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Peacock

Started by Traditionalist, October 26, 2011, 07:40:32 PM

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Traditionalist

   




Peacock "Eye" feather.                                   Loose Herl
   
   

There are a number of feathers from a peacock which may be used for various things, but for soft hackle spiders, mainly the herl ( or "Hurl" in some older books), from the eye feathers is used. This comes naturally in metallic green, and bronze. There is some controversy about how this comes about. It depends entirely on the particular strain of bird, and other factors.I have some herl which faded from bright green, to bronze, in sunlight, but this does not always happen.Quite a few other dressers have tried this, and it only worked for some of them! This is also because the metallic sheen and colour is not primarily caused by pigment, but by interference patterns on the surface of the feather. There are lots of species and subspecies of peacock;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peafowl

The herl is also stripped of its flue, and used as blank quill in a number of flies. For well marked quill, it must be taken from near the "eye", and this should also be one of the central quills from the tail. "Quill" is not the correct term, but everybody uses it. Many dressers have also dyed this in various colours. Magenta herl was once popular for various flies, and also the stripped quills were also dyed various colours. If you want to do this, then stroking it with the appropriate marker is a good idea! The quill does not make very robust bodies. It looks very attractive, and is used on many flies, but I generally prefer dubbed bodies on my wet flies.When you buy this, buy the quills! The loose herl in packets is difficult to work with, and you get a lot of wastage, apart from possibly not getting what you want anyway.

The herl from the secondaries was used as bodies or "dubbing" on  a few flies. Substitute cock pheasant centre tail.

The "sword" feathers are used for a couple of patterns, notably the Alexandra. These feathers come in "left" and "right" related to their locations on the bird! This should be borne in mind when attempting to make "paired" wings, as otherwise the curves will be all wrong! These fibres can be tricky to manipulate!




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