| This is what Eric Leiser has to say about it in his book Fly Tying Materials - Their Procurement, Use and Protection. First get some glass jars with screw on lids. Glass jars allow you to store the feathers without them being crushed as they are in plastic bags. He happens to cover "Wood Ducks" and "Mallards" in his book. Here goes.
Let's start with the wood duck. Since we need some of its feathers, there is no point in storing the entire skin, so we will just take it apart and store its feathers separately, according to their color and use. Most of us are interested in the lemon brown flank feathers on the bird. Pluck them out. Though it would be easy enough to store them in a jar as they are and forget them, it will be wiser if we first remove all the down from the base of each feather. Once all the fluff has been removed, they can be stored. You will find they take up much less space in the jar since they have been defluffed. The fluff, or down, is then put into another jar. Why? Because it makes excellent dubbing. You won't have to save too much down, since it is quite plentiful. But try to save various shades of it from different birds.
The flank feathers themselves fall into two divisions: those having black and white barred tips, and those without. They are stored separately. Next, the breast, with its flared white, fan-winged type feathers. These are also plucked, and the fluff stripped off. Incidentally, the fluffy base of any feather makes one of the favorite hiding places for moth larvae. Another good reason for using this procedure! All the white breast feathers are jarred separately from the brown ones on the upper breast, and further separation is carried through as the colors change in the neck area right up to the head.
Though not used as extensively as those of the mallard, wings can make fine winging. If you wish your flies to have exceptionally proportioned wings, the ideal way to make them would be to use a right and a left wing quill coming from the same bird, from the same wing position. Take a pair of wings coming from one duck, whether wood duck, mallard, teal or what have you, and first pluck the outer pointer quill from each wing. Keep these as a matching pair. Now take the second, or next quill in line from each wing and pair them up. Next the third and so on until you have all the primary wing quills off the duck, and they are evenly matched from their relative locations on each side. Keep these pairings as they are. You can place them in a narrow poly bag in pairs before jarring them. The third or forth quill in from the pointer quills will make the best winging material, for instance, for a black Gnat or a Blue Quill. Before these quills are jarred, however, you can go one step further. On each feather, whether from a duck, goose, or turkey, you can remove a quill strip from the center stem, which can be used for the ribbing of nymph patterns.
To free the quill strip from the feather, immerse the entire section in a jar of water for a day or so. Some feathers require a longer immersion period than others, and some less. After it has soaked the proper amount of time, take a single-edged razor blade and make a nick in the upper, or tip, part of the stem of the quill. You will loosed the hard, outer, celluloid like fiber from the stem and be able to peel the entire strip from the stem, while leaving the rest of the duck quill intact. The strippings from various birds come in different shades, and some of them have a darker edge to the quill, answering the need for segmentation where it is required. These stripped quills are also jarred or poly-bagged and labeled separately. Your work is still not finished.
Besides the primary quills, there are the secondaries, such as the white-tipped McGinty feather on the mallard. The same procedure applies. What about the small feathers on the upper shoulder of the wing? These range in shade from light to dark brown and from gray to black. Break them down in nomenclature, depending on the species of duck, an again store individually.
On the mallard you still have the large brown Nashua feathers to pluck and store. This is one of the more sought- after feathers for wing cases on nymphs. And, it would be a crime to forget the half dozen or so bronze feathers coming off the back of the bird near the upper wing joint and slightly under it.
Also on the mallard, besides the usual barred black and white flank feather, there are some that have a darker and more distinct marking; these are used for the March Brown. This particular shade of mallard flank is also a little stiffer in texture than its lighter-shaded neighbor. Also store apart from the others. The forgoing will give you some idea what can be done with individual birds.
End of quote from the book. So there you are. Have fun. All Leiser says in the book about storage is to wash everything in mild soapy water. Dry and store with mothballs. He doesn't use any kind of poison to kill possible eggs because he always forgets and wets the materials with his mouth while tying. He decided poison was a bad way to go.
Using microwaves for feathers and blenders for dubbing is usually frowned upon by the lady of the house, but it has been suggested that you microwave the feathers for about a minute or so to kill possible eggs. I haven't tried that so if you do let me know how it works.
Mike
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