Laura Erickson's For the Birds

(Recording of a Common Eider)

How do you get down from an elephant? You don’t–you get down from a duck.

(Mallard laugh)

Ounce for ounce, down is the finest insulating material known to man. And the softest, best insulation of all comes from a northern sea duck, the common eider. Eiders can easily survive temperatures of 50 degrees below zero, thanks to their exquisite down feathers.

A female eider pulls the soft inner feathers from her own body to line her nest, protecting her eggs and young from the permafrost of the ground beneath. Although eiders have been known to sit on their nests for the entire 28-day incubating period without a single break, if the mother does leave to feed or stretch for a short time she blankets the eggs with down until her return. If you ever read “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” you may recall that back in the days of Jules Verne, people collected down at intervals until the ducks had stripped themselves of the best down and started pulling off inferior feathers in desperation. Now, fortunately, the eider down industry is heavily regulated in Greenland, Iceland, and Canada. An eider’s body produces enough down for about one and a half nests, so down collectors can take a bit of down from nests without harm–but it takes the down from 35-40 nests to make just one pound of eider down.

I called a Howard Winslow of the American Down Association in Sacramento, California to find out more about down. He told me that the collecting of eider down is so painstaking that a pound of it currently costs $400. This year only 36 pounds were brought into the United States, and it isn’t available at all commercially.

So where do we get the down in our sleeping bags and jackets? Mr. Winslow said that 80% of it is imported, from 30 different countries. The main source is China; then Germany, and then France. The down feathers are a by-product of their goose and duck meat industries.

I also called the customer service department at L.L.Bean, in Maine, where I talked to a Mr. Andrew. He said that although down is clearly the best insulating material known, synthetic substitutes have one important advantage in normal use–they’re not ruined when they get wet. Ducks and geese have preen glands at the base of their tails which they use to coat their outer feathers with oil. And ducks and geese don’t sweat. So they never have problems with wet down the way the Steger North Pole expedition did–after a month, their sleeping bags each weighed over 50 pounds from absorbed body moisture, and the 6 team members had to jettison two bags. For the final weeks of their journey, they zipped the last four bags together into two doubles, and slept three people in each. Mr. Andrew pointed out one other problem with down. He said, “A lot of people don’t like to go around looking like the Michelin Man.” Now that people take advantage of layering different types of clothing, synthetic down substitutes like thinsulate work just about as well as the real thing, and may be a bit more stylish–after all, you’ll never see an eider in a turtle neck.

(Mallard Laugh)

This is Laura Erickson, and this coast-to-coast investigative reporting has been “For the Birds.”

(Recording of a Common Eider)