...for herself. She calls it Feather Hunting. It started Tuesday when she was give a turkey feather at the nature class for answering a question about turkeys. Well...now she loves feathers. She has a feather box in the porch. She's been collecting quite a few. She has some favorites. She even knows where she found each one. She was showing them to me saying, "...and this one I found outside the bank on the sidewalk when we were there today." :lol: I'm not overly sure how clean the feathers are...so they are staying in the porch. She does bring them in some times to look at them under the microscope.
That actually sounds like something my dd9 would do. You can totally make that hobby educational by matching the feathers to the kind of bird!
That is great! Emily used to keep a plastic box with a lid in her playhouse. She kept her treasures in it. Feathers, rocks, leaves and anything else she found that she liked.
I'm really starting think that she and Rylee are 2 peas in a pod :lol: Rylee would be all there helping her! We always have some strange collection going.
Oh, I just though of something you'd want to keep in the back of your mind!!! When Faythe was younger, we were camping at a state park in Kentucky. She found a really pretty bird feather on the ground, which of course she picked up because it was so neat. She showed it to one of the park rangers. We had done several guided hikes, etc., with this guy. He was able to tell her what bird it was from, and then told her she either needed to drop it on the ground or "hide it". And if she found any more feathers, she ought to look at them and then leave them. Why? Because it was actually ILLEGAL for her to be picking up bird feathers like that (!!!). He was very nice and had enough sense to know it was a child's natural curiosity, which needs to be encouraged. But he said some of the other rangers would have had a fit.
Jackie, that was in a state park. You can't pick anything up in a state park and take it home. But feathers, etc., that you find around your own neighborhood are fair game! Batmom, feathers can be washed if you put them in sudsy water with Dawn and stroke them with a finger lightly in the direction the barbs go. If they wash live birds with it after oil spills, it's gotta be okay, right? Maybe she could turn them into art, or put them in a scrapbook of sorts? or a display kind of like insect collections?
Certain feathers are illegal regardless because particular birds are protected. Eagle feathers, for example, unless you're a Native American who is using them for religious purposes.
I know in GA it's illegal to pick up any bird feather and keep it even if you find it in your own yard. And this is what's wrong with our country...how much time was spent passing that law?
My chickens leave tons of feathers in my yard lol... I can mail a few to anyone that wants some! I found a birds nest, and it had my chickens feathers woven throughout it.
Well for petes sake. I googled it and it does appear to be illegal. Some kinds of feathers are allowed to be collected, but I would have no idea what ones are ok and what ones are not. So, it's possible that I have contraband in my porch and I'm harboring a criminal. :roll: I wonder why the nature center, which is run by the DNR, was giving out turkey feathers then??
Maybe they were farm-raised "wild" turkeys, and those are okay because the birds were harvested for meat at the farm??? They're not migratory, they're farm fowl, so they wouldn't be covered under the Migratory Birds Act...
Yes, it is illegal to collect bird feathers. My son has a large collection of feathers that he has found in our yard and I'm not too concerned about him being a criminal. If any law enforcement officer gets upset, I guess we can just dump them right back into the yard.
Well, I think we better line up all those kindergarten criminals!!! Maybe make a federal government agency that will cost another billion dollars, and send SWAT teams into the school. You never know when some hardened feather-collector might be hiding!!! :roll:
Well, shoot, my daughter is a full fledged criminal! For the first time ever she brought in a feather that belonged to something other than a turkey (turkies aren't migratory, so they are fair game). She had 2 red-tailed hawk feathers tonight.
