Off the Wing

Chelsie Corcoran is surrounded by feathers. Iridescent gray feathers from an osprey. Ultramarine plumage from a blue jay. Plastic bags full of other feathers from kestrels and ravens, barred owls and screech owls, peregrines and hawks.

There were more than 1,400 in all. In years past, she might have swept them up from our bird enclosures, disposing of most, while keeping some to show visitors and use others as scent-training aids for our resident otters.

Now, though, she is packaging them for shipment to Oklahoma, where a federally sanctioned repository run by the Comanche Nation provides feathers to Native American tribes for ceremonial use.

“We didn’t know that this is a resource that people needed or wanted,” says Corcoran, an assistant curator. “But now we do.”

Corcoran was at a zookeepers’ conference in 2018 when she learned of the value feathers have to Native tribes. But longestablished federal laws to protect birds make it a federal offense, literally, to possess feathers of migratory birds (which is to say, most birds you see.) And that has made it hard for Indigenous tribes to replace worn ceremonial objects or make new ones.

Which is why Corcoran was in a conference room cataloging and cleaning feathers before sending them to Sia, the feather repository. One of just a handful of places legally allowed to collect feathers, the organization—named for the Comanche word for “feather”—distributes them on a first-come, first-served basis to recognized tribes.

This complicated process is necessary because of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, among the nation’s first conservation laws. Then, the U.S. government was responding to a wave of bird extinctions. The Labrador duck went first in 1878. Others followed, including the great auk and passenger pigeon. Many were hunted to oblivion for food and fashion—at the time, feathers for ladies’ hats were tres chic.

In all, the MBTA protects nearly 1,100 bird species.

Corcoran has learned that feathers from most of the bird species cared for by The Wild Center can be used somewhere. Which makes her happy: While some of those feathers were shed naturally, others came from birds once in her care that have since died. “For me, personally, these feathers do hold a story,” says Corcoran, who is able to name some of the birds once attached to the feathers by pattern alone. (“This is a tail feather from our female kestrel, Zuma. And this kestrel feather is from my falconry bird, Vega,” she says.)

The project has “helped me give them meaning beyond death,” she says. “An American kestrel might live to be 13 to 17. But it could have life through culture that lasts 50 years or more. They’re going to go on and have a new life that may pass down through generations.”