BOISE, Idaho — Fly-shop manager Jim Bernstein was warned that hair stylists would come banging on his door, but he didn’t listen.
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 lures.
“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.
“I’m looking around the shop thinking hmm, what else can they put in their hair?” Bernstein said.
Fly fishermen are not happy, bemoaning the trend in online message boards and sneering at so- called “feather ladies.” Some also blame “American Idol” judge and rocker Steven Tyler, who began wearing the feathers in his long hair.
“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.
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 Delta, Colo., 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.
As hair extensions, the feathers can be brushed, blow dried, straightened and curled once they are snapped into place. Most salons sell the feather strands for $5 to $10 apiece. The trend has become so popular a company online even sells feather extensions for dogs.
The craze has also left hairstylists scrambling to find rooster saddle feathers, as fly shops hold onto a select few for their regular customers. The businesses will now ask if the feathers are for hairdressing, said Shelley Ambroz, who owns MiraBella Salon and Spa in Boise. “If you go in and you’re a woman, they won’t sell to you,” said Ambroz, who started to eye her husband’s fly-fishing gear after stores ran out.
“He told me to stay out of his feathers,” she said.
Whiting Farms is harvesting about 1,500 birds a week for their feathers and still can’t keep up with its current orders, said owner and founder Tom Whiting, a poultry geneticist. The company has stopped taking on new accounts.
“I’ve tried to withhold some for the fly-fishing world because when the fashion trend goes away, which it will, I’ve still got to make a living,” he said.
