Bird 88 – Common Eider

Ah with the winter season still upon us, we all look for ways to keep warm. And sometimes there’s nothing better than a bit of fluffy duck down.

But where does that duck down come from? Geese mostly. There are two ways to get down from a Goose. You can wait until it’s slaughtered for meat and then plucked, or you can live-pluck it. This is quite traumatic for the birds and leaves them bloodied and bruised. Thankfully, it’s illegal in most countries, and official reports state that only about 1% of down is sourced this way.

However, as anyone who knows anything about birds will tell you (and I’m about to), Geese that are killed for meat are killed when they’re about a year old, but Geese don’t develop quality down until they’re about 2 or 3 years old. So, there’s obviously a mismatch here, and some studies speculate that the true scale of live-plucking could be as high as 80%, with most of the world’s supply coming from China. But here’s the good news, there is one bird that voluntarily sheds its down every year. You don’t have to kill it, or pluck it.

That bird? The Common Eider (Somateria mollissima)

This is a large sea-duck that lives in the Arctic waters around Iceland. And every year, when they nest, they shed their down feathers to keep their eggs warm.

Since the 1600s people have been gathering up the down, and this is actually where the practice of using duck down for insulation originates from. Their Latin name (Somateria mollissima) even translates as ‘very soft body wool’.

It’s also one of the few example of people profiting from an animal without any harm whatsoever coming to the animal. People will wait until the chicks have fledged before gathering the down, or otherwise will replace the down with some other insulation to keep the eggs warm. Common Eiders also aren’t farmed or kept domestically, they’re a completely wild population. Although, these days people do build little shelters to protect their nesting sites from predators and assist with down collection.

Of course, it takes about 50-60 nests to produce one kilogram of feathers, which all has to be gathered and sorted by hand. Unsurprisingly, Eider down is super expensive and considered to be the highest grade of down available. A genuine, bonafide, certified Eider Down pillow will set you back about $5,000.

So maybe when buying some nice duck down products this year, the best option is to just go synthetic.

The birds will thank you.  

04/08/2019