Hey Gary, maybe a trip to the fishing isle! Buy a jig and some dental floss. I use a feather too. They are great till it rains!:)

A fly tying shop will have marabou in a bucnh of colors. I use small downy grouse feathers. I prefer feathers to the powder bottles, one less thing to carry and don’t like the movement required to use the bottles.

Turkey have “marabou” style underfeathers on their breasts and that’s what you will find in fishing supply shops. Works great.

While you’re in the fly tying section take a look at ‘Cul de Canard’ feathers. Very light and sensitive to the wind, CDC has natural water repellent characteristics.

I’m not sure of the type of feather I have on my recurve. It was a small feather that happened to be in my stand one afternoon when I went hunting. I snagged it and tied it on with some dental floss when I got home that evening. It pretty, it’s a bright yellow and fades to a green. To cool to leave floatin’ on a breeze.

-Jeremy

Ah, my feathery friends, I must admit that while I admire your purity, i prefer cigar smoke as wind-checker. 😯 Since so few of my hunts make meat (I wonder why? :roll:), I may as well enjoy “sitting in the woods and smoking,” which is how my lovely wife explains my hunting addiction to her friends. I figure, well heck, if it’s downwind, it’s gone, no matter what I smelt like. But then I may have noticed over the years that when I’m smoking top-end Cubans (don’t ask where I get em, please),lots of game comes in downwind, snorting and licking there lips hungrily. But if I’m smoking Swisher Sweets I don’t see much of nothing, including my wife when I get home, no matter how much I brush my teeth. Hunting these days is so durn complicated! 😉 H

Homer, you are a hoot!

I believe you, Homer. 😉

Years ago I was set-up in a ground blind and I smelled a cigar. A bit later an older man came walking by at an unhurried pace: gun slung over his shoulder, one hand in his wool plaid Mackinaw pocket, cigar in teeth.

I waved and thought: “Now there’s a man who just needs an excuse to get out of the house.”

I like the squared off look of the turkey breast feather. I strip the down off so that what is left looks like a triangle. I tie it to a length of serving and let it hang from the upper string loop of my bow. I use other feathers too. I found where something killed a flicka. Picked up a few of the yellow and black feathers to use for wind checks.

i got the idea of using dental floss from asbell in one of his books for checking the wind.rdb

I’ve used the hackle of Ruffed Grouse feathers, and they work well.

I’m thinking that most of you gentlemen are hunting from treestands? Absolutely I agree with you that a feather makes a great wind-checker, and a feather from a wild bird we’ve kilt ourselves, like a grouse, makes it all the more earthy and traditional. But darn, I mostly hunt elk from the ground, and most often before an arrow lets fly, we (the elk and me) wind up really close, I mean really close with those huge brown eyes peering into my bald skull in situations so intense that any honest whitetail would have been gone ages before it came to that. In such almost supernatural close encounters I find myself squinting my eyes almost shut, even while wearing a face mask, and trying like some crazwed Buddhist monk to breath without breathing, for fear I’ll be busted. Consequently, knowing that may well come to this happy but electrically intense final moment of stand-off, I’ve never dared to have a flopping flipping feather on my bow … rather like jiggling a dry fly in front of a hungry trout’s nose — he IS going to tune in on that. All of which may be a non sequitur to the discussion at hand, but hey it’s happy hour again. I use “smoke in a bottle” and only when I think I can get away with it. Lotsa ways to skin a cat, and I’m not a cat lover. anon 😯

I can understand that Dave, Different animal. I hunt almost exclusively on the ground. But with Whitetails there is such a thing as too close.

I use “Smoke in a Bottle” also. I use the little squeeze bottles filled with baking soda, it has no odor and it works great as an anti-presperant. I like it over floss or a feather because the wind needs to be checked before the animals are to close to check the wind. If an animal is so close that I’m worried about movement the wind is good enough for me.

As a result of typically getting up way too early to hunt, I often tend to neglect proper dental hygiene on those mornings. I find that the resulting ‘coffee and Pop Tart breath’ is all the wind indicator I usually need.