Fly shop manager Jim Bernstein was warned that hair stylists would come banging on his door, but he didn't listen.Read the rest and weep. Of course, by euthanize, they mean behead, butcher and eat the way normal human beings do.
Sure enough, less than 24 hours later, a woman walked into the Eldredge Bros. Fly Shop in Maine and made a beeline toward a display of hackles — the long, skinny rooster feathers fishermen use to make lure.
"She brought a bunch up to the counter and asked if I could get them in pink," he said. "That's when I knew."
Fly fishing shops nationwide, he learned, are at the center of the latest hair trend: Feather extensions. Supplies at stores from the coasts of Maine to landlocked Idaho are running out, and some feathers sold online are fetching hundreds of dollars more than the usual prices.
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"It takes years and years and years to develop these chickens to grow these feathers. And now, instead of ending up on a fly, it's going into women's hair," said Matt Brower, a guide and assistant manager at Idaho Angler in Boise.
"I think that's the reason a lot of people are a little peeved about it," he said.
The feathers are not easy to come by in the first place.
They come from roosters that are genetically bred and raised for their plumage. In most cases, the birds do not survive the plucking.
At Whiting Farms, Inc., in western Colorado, one of the world's largest producers of fly tying feathers, the roosters live about a year while their saddle feathers — the ones on the bird's backside and the most popular for hair extensions — grow as long as possible. Then the animal is euthanized.
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It's not uncommon to find a package of rooster saddle feathers that would have cost around $60 at a fly shop now priced from $200 to $400.
A package of the most popular fly tying hackle for hair extensions, a black and white striped feather called grizzly saddle, would normally retail anywhere from $40 to $60. It sold for $480 on eBay last month after 31 bids.
And to think of all the hackles we've thrown away. The thing is to pluck the hackles out before beheading our cocks. That way they aren't covered in blood.
