Premium Selected Marabou

You’re always going to have some bad feathers in a pack of marabou, but these ones were not great overall. Still usable. I think I prefer the hareline strung blood quills.

Pros: there are no truly junk feathers that you have to toss, and you don’t need to trim off any gross lower fibers. The product is consistent in that sense, and every feather is technically usable. Dye is uniform with no sections of white barbs that didn’t accept due.

Also good: many of the feathers have stems thin/flexible enough for palmering.

Cons: lots of bent or twisted feathers. The barbs are still useful when stripped off the stem on these, or you can snip off a good chunk of the tip and bundle it in for a streamer tail.

Main con for me is that the tips of the barbs have no barbules on them. They’re just straight with minimal body. There’s a distinct cutoff point on each barb where the marabou goes from having full fluffy barbules to straight tips. Sometimes I like the flowier less fluffy marabou and sometimes I want it fluffier, but this is both types on the same feather and it just doesn’t look right to me. In a typical package of strung blood quills, you’ll get different types of feathers but more consistency of barbules within the same feather.

As I said, I guess most of the feathers are usable and the fish would probably not care too much, but I just don’t like the look and feel of this marabou as much as other types, and I’ll often rip off the thin tips with my fingernails to get the right profile after tying in.