Harvesting turkey feathers?

[Iowabowhunter]

How do you tell primary from secondary feathers?

Going to ask all my compound buddies to save their wings from birds they get this year (and mine as well hopefully) to turn into fletching.

I've never done this before, any pointers?

[Roy from Pa]

The primary are the front feathers of the wing.

They are longer than the secondary.

[Iowabowhunter]

The primary are the front feathers of the wing.

They are longer and wider than the secondary.

Ah ok, thanks. Is there always a specific # or primaries per wing?

I've also read that primaries make better fletching-any truth to this?

Sorry for my naivete, never done this before.

[Roy from Pa]

Primary feathers are the best.

[Jack Denbow]

The wing has 3 parts, imagine a chicken wing. The smallest part, the pointy end, contain the primaries. The next section, the one with 2 bones in it contain the secondary's. The third part, the one that looks like a mini drumstick has no usable feathers.

[Orion]

What's already been said.  The primaries are the 9 feathers on the front end of the wing.  They make better fletching than the secondaries because they're stiffer.

[reddogge]

I've had secondaries whistle loudly so I won't use them anymore. BTW those feathers down near the body are called tertials, at least on a duck. Ducks have large and prominent tertials, in fact, a mallard's tertials are the largest visible feather on it's body.

[durp]

Make sure you don't mix the left with the right wing feathers on the same arrow...have fun 

[Jon Stewart]

I use heavy duty wire cutters and cut them off the wing, all of the wing feathers. I then send them to a guy who will split and grind them. You tell him what wing you want and he will keep the other wing. That way you don't have to breath the dust. You get full length ground feathers back. The flight feathers are stiffer than secondarys but I use both with no problems.  I also use a goose feather as the cock feather once in awhile because it looks good to me.

[Eric Krewson]

The secondarys are the wide feathers. I have collected a few wild turkey feather over the years, my best haul was 70 wings in one year from my turkey hunting friends.

[fujimo]

the dust is highly toxic, so just be careful!
 there was a post on here a few years back, by a fella that did the commercial grinding thing, he was making a last appeal to folk to avoid the dust, it contains naphthalene, i believe.
 he had developed some kind of disease that they were trying some last ditch cancer medication on.
It was a very sad post!

[Eric Krewson]

Any kind of dust bothers me, I ground my own feathers for several years, when I found out people would grind them for free on the halves I never ground another one.