midger wrote:Welcome to the fray, and if you're not a fly tyer, save those ditch parrot tail feathers. Lots of folks use them.
Are there that many areas you can hunt pheasants up north? I used to hunt them a lot when I grew up in Idaho. We used to even carry our shotguns in our cars/trucks to high school so we could leave for the fields at the end of the day. Can you imagine the trouble you'd get in if you tried that today?
I'm afraid I don't kill many wild birds anymore, as we've about run out of them up here in the Sacramento Valley. The environmental conditions are no longer suitable to a strong population with the rice farmed fencerow to fencerow (leaving no set-aside ground) and irrigation so efficient that no water ends up anywhere except precisely where it's intended to go. It all results in no brood-rearing cover for the hens.
I used to get 15 roosters a year on trips to far northeastern Montana, but I've sat those out the past 3 years since my daughter (now 5) entered preschool. She goes to kindergarten this year and I may start going again when she reaches first grade. The problem then will be that my canine crew will be of advanced age and I don't want to start a new puppy with all the kid activities we have.
I did some hunting in Idaho when I was a teenager in the late '70s/early '80s and it was still real good then. We hunted some in the Burley-Rupert area and also some out by Shoshone. Those populations have been decimated as well.
One tail fan will get me through 3 or 4 years of tying and I give quite a few away. I'm pretty sure I still have one or two left over from my last trip to Montana in 2010. Those feathers are beautiful – just a deep olive hue, some almost leaning a little bit toward yellow.