Peacock feathers for fly body

This natural material has been the basis for making artificial flies for centuries.
Of this, for all fly fishermans, the “sacred” feather is used in fly tying just about everything. Those tail feathers are the most prized, the so-called okca. But any other pen or any part of the pen is also used. There is even a well-known fly peacock fly, it is a fly made from the handle of a peacock feather or a rooster, so the second variant is called a scraped rooster.

As there are not many of these birds in my area, at the beginning of my business, it was a real fortune and happiness when I would get at least one tail feather, an eye. In the past, these feathers were kept in vases in households as a decorative object, like flowers. And from that former fashion, I mostly procured, from decorative jars, rarely from live peacock birds.

There is a fishing anecdote that the cleaner of the Sarajevo Zoo supplied half of the Sarajevo fishermen with these feathers, cleaning the peacock cage in the zoo in that city. In my previous blog article, I read in the comments that people from urban areas have always figured out how to get these precious pens. It was always through the cleaners of some zoos or backyards.