 Okay. And Susan, if you'd like to go ahead, please. Okay. Hi, everyone. How are you? We're glad to have you here. We've been hoping to do something on feathers for a long time, so that's our chance today. I'm just going to go through my slides fairly quickly. If you have questions, put them in the general chat box, and I'll make sure that they get taken out and that they get answered at the end. And so the best way to keep in touch with us is by joining the C2CC Announce List. It's just announcements, maybe two or three a month. Or you can like us on Facebook or you can follow us on Twitter. And if you need help due to a disaster, this is a 24-hour National Heritage Responders line, and they'd be happy to help. We know that people have been suffering from a lot of fires and floods and hurricanes. Our discussion forum that used to be on the website has moved, and so you can go to Connecting to Collections Care, ConnectingToCollections.org, and get instructions on how to move over to the new platform. But we'll still give you the same service. We'll still answer questions, and we'd be happy to have you. You can contact me anytime. This is my email address. Coming up, we have the end of this month, a free webinar on preserving artifacts of free speech, caring for political memorabilia. The beginning of next month, we have a webinar on closing a museum for good. And because that's a question that comes up, and we're also beginning our first course. And if you register by today, or the end of today, you can get a discount still. Otherwise, you can register up until the day of the course. And it's a course on preservation methods and materials for exhibitions, and it's being offered in conjunction with Packin. Okay, so I'm going to turn this over to Ellen Perlstein, our first presenter, and she'll be followed by Rita Horan. So, Ellen, there you are. Thank you, Susan. Hello, everybody. I see some names here that are familiar, and I'm delighted. My name is Ellen Perlstein. I'm at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to that, I was a museum conservator for 25 years. So, you know, I'm not going to dwell on biography details, but I've been very involved with the documentation and caring for feather work in recent years. So I'd like to share with you. So feather work is represented in many of our collections in all different formats, right? Everything from taxidermy to study skins to contemporary sculpture in the center, UCS Live, of a sculpture by the artist, Peta Coyne. And Peta Coyne had a period of working where she used taxidermy bird specimens in conjunction with other materials in creating these quite sizable, complex sculptures. And then, of course, in fashion and couture. So we have a lot of feathers used in, you know, hats and dresses, et cetera, et cetera. And then also in regalia. So the image on the far right is from the California State Indian Museum, and it's an example of a display of native regalia from California. And that actually reminds me that we started some poll questions for all of you. And the first poll is asking what kinds of feather work are found in your collections between these different categories. So really, I'm looking forward to, you know, hearing your responses. So when I consider the condition of feather work and I consider the different exposures that feathers have had, I think about it in three different stages. I consider first life cycle wear and tear on feathers. Obviously, birds, molt, they go through a molting phase, either annually or semi-annually. And so birds actually have feathers that are undergoing exposure to light and ultraviolet radiation. They're preening their feathers. They're oiling their feathers. They're doing all kinds of things, but their feathers get pretty worn out right before the molt when they replace them. So there are features of feathers that are actually life cycle damaged during the life of the bird. Then there is cultural wear of feathers. So, you know, typically feathers are used in lots of different formats that may be performed. So the middle image is Maidu and Miwok. Feathered regalia being performed up north of San Francisco at an event that I attended. And, you know, the feathers are maintained by these regalia makers. They're, you know, as I said, they're performed. They're preserved. There's a whole set of use wear, cultural use wear, that occurs with feathers. We have to be aware of that, too. And then, finally, there's the collections life cycle of feathers, right? So while feathers are in our collections, like in the image on the right, they also undergo exposure to light and ultraviolet and handling and travel and all kinds of things. So I like to think about these three phases because we, you know, some things we may mistake and we think have happened to feathers during their time in our collection. And perhaps that's not the case. Perhaps it proceeded entering our collection. So one of the major things we have to think about when we're dealing with handling feather work is the fact that feathers have often been treated with toxic pesticides and that there may be residual pesticides present. And in fact, I just see here, thank you for the posting my second query, which is about the numbers of feathered items in your collection. And then later on, I'll also be asking about whether or not your feathers have been treated with toxic pesticides, whether you know that whether they've been treated with toxic pesticides. So, you know, this arsenic skull and crossbones may be familiar to some of you, but unfortunately in many cases, there is no labeling to indicate that a pesticide of this toxicity has been used. So we have to make assumptions. We have to pretty much assume that just about every feather may have been treated in some way unless we know otherwise. The current slide I'm showing you has to do with Native American materials. So the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which passed in 1990, was amended in 1996. And it means that any federal agency, any agency receiving U.S. dollars, any museum or library or archive or any repository receiving federal dollars, has to document and present known treatments of regalia or, you know, sacred materials that with pesticides, preservatives, or other substances that could present a hazard to people who are going to be handling those materials. So obviously awareness of a pesticide presence has been a very important topic for conservation and collections care of feather work over the last, you know, 20-some-odd years. So what is your immediate kind of protection that you can afford yourself? And I would say immediately that that is always handling feather work with gloves irrespective of whether or not you know that it's been treated, always handle it with gloves. In this particular image, I would say that the wearer on the right who's wearing the blue nitrile glove is taking the more appropriate step versus wearing cotton gloves. Cotton gloves are not impermeable to toxic pesticides, and therefore, whereas nitrile gloves are. And so, you know, the wearer on the left is at risk while the wearer at the right is not. Also, looking at your collections can sometimes be a very interesting, can provide an interesting set of clues. If you have collections that have very similar, very similar feather decoration and a similar format, and you see that one is beautifully preserved, the feathers are beautifully preserved, and the other example is the absolute opposite. I would say that you should, you can handle the one on the right without nearly the caution that you might take with the item on the left. So better preservation, more chance that it's been treated, right, with pesticides. So I also have a poll question, poll number four, which is asking whether featherworks in your collections have been treated with toxic pesticides, if you know, and I'd be very interested to know your answers. So I'm sort of crazy about documentation of feathers, and I feel like there's a standard that we perhaps should all use or aspire to use, and I think it's because feathers represent a lot of cultural decision-making and that that is really important to document, just as other materials are important to document. So this is an image of a curator from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., Candice Green, and Candice is making the evaluation that the tribal use of certain feathers reflects not only the cultural choices, but also which birds were dominant in a given area. So there's been a huge project at the National Museum of Natural History, and I have the link on the screen here, to better understand these particular collections through identification of the bird species whose feathers are represented, and that's actually represented in my poll number three, which is to find out from all of you what percent of the birds in your collections have been identified in terms of the featherwork. In addition to documenting the bird source, and there are tools to allow us to better do this as collections care specialists, I also think it's really important to document the ways in which feathers have been attached and adapted and modified, and the image that you're seeing here was prepared by Molly Gleason, who is a UCLA Getty alumni and was a research associate as well, and you can see that there are all these different ways that feathers are typically attached to other media when they're prepared. So folding and wrapping and inserting is very, very common. Wrapping, just wrapping, simple wrapping, as you see in the center, to right-hand images, is another very common attachment method. Tying on, so literally encircling a group of feathers and knotting it on the other side to tie things. Adhering is used, sewing is used, especially when the skin is still on the featherwork, sewing to another material. And then feather wrapping, which you see in the lower right, is actually almost like feathers can be spun the same way, especially plumacious but downy feathers, can be spun the same way that yarns are, and they can then be used as an element for wrapping and weaving. Then we're going to also look at feather modification techniques. Again, there are all these modification techniques. So when you're looking at feathers, you may not see them the way they actually appear on the bird. They may actually have been trimmed. So the arrow is pointing to feathers. There are a group of different feathers. This is also deer skin. The center section is deer skin. But some feathers are trimmed to look pointier than they actually are on the body of the bird. And it's really interesting culturally to know that this happens. This is a beautiful technique of serration. Where feathers are trimmed to have this kind of serrated edge. And I knew of this only from Central and Northern California and some other areas in the American Southwest. And now I've found that it's actually used on certain Pacific islands and showing up on Pacific Islander featherwork. So again, these are really, really interesting kinds of cultural adaptations that are being applied to featherwork. Here's an example of where the feather has been split. So here's another point. Feathers are really valuable. People who collect and work with feathers consider them to be rare and precious. In more recent times they're also considered endangered or protected and Irene is going to talk about that. But people try to actually make their feathers go farther. So the idea of splitting the central shaft of a feather and actually getting two ornaments out of it is there's a lot of good cultural, social reasons behind that. These are stripped feathers. So this is again the Central California and I have a very strong, interesting California featherwork. So these are where the barbs or the colorful legions on the side of each shaft of a feather have been stripped off except for at the tips. And this is a distinct choice that's being made to create a certain kind of headdress. And it was the headdress that I showed you in the second slide in the center showing cultural use. So this is something that we see a lot in California. And then finally, the final modification technique that I'll just show you right now in this conversation is where the shaft is cut. So the central heavy section of the feather, which is that shaft, has actually been cut in this fancy format in a form of notching. And this also is California regalia. And it makes the feathers curl and it makes them lighter in weight so that if you're performing the featherwork, if it's a headdress or a dance plume, it actually is lighter in weight and can actually have more movement. It has more movement. So these, I think, are all really important to record as you look at feathers in your collection. Also, by the way, I should just say I see that people are posting about working with ornithologists. And I think that working with ornithologists is a really exceptionally good way to proceed. If you have access to an ornithologist who can help you identify feathers, that is really great, really, really great. So now I want to talk about the kinds of damage. We've just talked about documenting featherwork and understanding a little bit more about its origin and background. And now I want to talk about four major classes of damage that occur to feathers and in some instances, steps that you can take or steps that are taken by conservators. So we're looking at dirt, insect damage, breakage or mechanical damage and damage from light and ultraviolet energy. We'll talk about each of these in time now. So we're talking first about dirt and I want to bring your attention to the image in the lower left because I've been talking about that central shaft quite a bit and also about downy feathers. This is just a diagram to show you what some of the technical terms are. So that central shaft in a feather is referred to as a rachus, R-A-C-H-I-S, and the lowest portion of the feather that gets inserted into the body of the bird and passes through the bird's skin is known as the calamus and only the calamus is hollow. And so if you think about the slide, I showed you where the feather is turned over, folded over at that base and inserted back into that hollow section. You can see that people are taking advantage of the fact that that calamus is hollow. Also, the two sides that project off of that central shaft or rachus are referred to as the vein and they're made up of barbs. So each of those individual elements are barbs and those barbs are hooked together with tiny, tiny little hooks that are known as barbules. And there are typically two different kinds of feathers. They're more than two, but for our discussion, there are these smooth feathers that are known as panaceas. So the image of the drawing on the left would be a smooth panacea feather and then at the base of both of these feathers, there is this downy feather which is referred to as plumulaceas. And the image on the upper left which is the detail of a zuni katina is also showing new plumulaceas, the white feathers, the soiled white feathers are plumulaceas are downy feathers and the orange feather below them is a smooth, panacea feather. But it brings me, again, back to this question of dirt. I'm defining this so that I can really talk through this notion of dirt. So cleaning, addressing dirt depends on the use, the type and the purpose for the item. So the first question I have because there's so much indigenous feather work, the first question I have is, is the feather work still in use? Is it still being worn or damp? Is it in the possession of the person who made it? And will that influence the way in which cleaning takes place? And I can tell you that the answer is most decidedly yes. I've had a lot of conversations with feather workers who tell me their own care practices. But let's say it's in your collection and you are kind of now tasked with its care. So my questions would then be, are the feathers strong and stable? And my next question would be, are the feathers the smooth, panacea kind? Or are they the downy or penacea kind? The downy feathers are much more difficult to clean. As soon as they are disrupted, they tend to lose a lot of material. They're trickier to clean carefully. And so there are all of these considerations. I'll be showing you some examples of cleaning of smooth feathers. And then perhaps I can take questions about the more downy feathers. But my next question is, can you access the feathers individually? Because oftentimes, as we know, feathers almost never alone from other items. They're always attached to something made out of a completely different material. And often we can only access one part or a few parts of the featherwork. And we can't, so our goals have to be in keeping with what we can actually access when we set out to clean feathers. And then my final question is, might there be pigment or material traces on the feathers that warrant preservation? And have you looked closely enough to actually determine whether there's something present that could be really important that might get compromised when you carry out a cleaning? So all of that, I'm very interested in this careful looking and careful documentation of feathers for all of these reasons. So if you've considered all of those questions and you feel you are able to clean featherwork that's in your collection, there are I think two really important steps that I would ask you to do. Number one is take photographs. Take photographs before beginning, even if they're the simplest point and choose photographs. Take photographs of all sides that you can access and take photographs of details of what the foiling actually looks like. And then number two, if you have to figure out how you're going to safely support the featherwork. And I think this image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Fashion, which is all feathered. I mean, this is all feathered fashion. And I feel like, you know, if you could imagine in your mind's eye, how would you support these feathered garments in preparation for cleaning? Especially the one on the right, which I mean, I don't know these items, but I'm just saying, you can see how, why I'm stressing, the idea of figuring out in advance how you're going to support the featherwork. So eight pesticides are suspected, and we've already said that if the feathers are robust and well, you know, in a reasonably good condition, pesticides are very highly likely. You should be supporting your featherwork on a disposable liner on your work surface. So I would say that you could use a liner of soft tissue or a liner of Tyvek, and on the handout that is provided, you'll find all of these, every supply that's discussed in this webinar is outlined there with sources for purchase. But for example, if you have a three-dimensional object that has feathers appended onto it, like the item on the right, you can take it off of its mount, put your tissue or your Tyvek across the mount itself, have it extend out beyond the farthest point that the feathers reach out, you know, beyond the base of the mount, place the headdress back, and carry out your cleaning with that protective interleaf so that you are able to safely dispose of whatever might be collecting materials that you are now dislodging. One of the things we know about toxic pesticide residues, a lot of them are heavy metals, they're particulate, they will stay in place and only be toxic if you directly contact them or if you displace them. If you displace them, vacuuming is a perfect way to displace toxic pesticide. Next, I would say that you would want to use flat-sable brushes and you would want to make sure that you are labeling those brushes as only for use with pesticide suspected items. You can clean the brushes with detergent and water in between and dry them, but I would still segregate them and restrict their use. Also for cleaning pesticide-ridden pieces, a triple-filtered vacuum cleaner known as a HEPA filtered vacuum is a very crucial component for their cleaning. There are large, expensive vacuum cleaners that are, again, they're listed on the handout. Those have variable speed and they're great and micro tools are available for them. But there are also these less expensive, what I've imaged here is a less expensive HEPA vacuum that's made for cleaning computer printers and protection from making copier tone or airborne. And this is the idea of these, the HEPA vacuums, no matter whether you have a large, robust one or a smaller one, is that you are not wanting to exhaust into the environment what you're brushing. You want it to be caught by your filtration. And you can see I put an X next to the nylon brush that comes with these kinds of HEPA vacuums. That is not something you'd want to use, but the micro tools are something you'd want to use. This is an example of one of the larger HEPA vacuums. And we always recommend that you have something covering the vacuum nozzle that some sort of mesh, whether it is pantyhose or cheese cloth, is held over the vacuum nozzle with a rubber band or a tie. And you want to do this because very often when you're examining featherwork, you cannot tell that there are loose barbs or there are loose feathers that are actually only being held by the mechanical action of the rest of the feathers. And so you want to be sure that you're not sucking any of those feathers up into your vacuum and totally losing them. So my recommendation for vacuuming or dry cleaning feathers is, again, nitrile gloves and a dust mask or respirator to protect yourself. Your support is... Your worktop, your bench is lined with a disposable material. You are, to the extent possible, supporting separate feathers with water paper where possible. If you don't have water paper, you can use another kind of paper-based material to support the feather. Water paper has a certain kind of strength that creates a platform that you can hold on to. And then you always want to brush feathers parallel to the barbules. So the diagram on the right is showing you the brushing action that you want to take because you want to encourage your feathers to keep that alignment that they have when they're on the bird. Also very useful for dry cleaning feathers are microfiber cloths. These are now incredibly popular. They're nylon and polyester. And the percentages... Don't worry about the percentages I have here. If you can... And I've put down on the handout some suppliers for weighted, non-waffle, smooth microfiber cloths. These are exceptional at trapping dirt and dust. They can be... I encourage you to buy the white ones that come in white and the non-waffle-y ones so that they're very, very smooth. You can tie these onto the nozzle of your vacuum and you can place them in contact with the featherwork and run them over the featherwork and pick up soiling as you're cleaning. And you can also... If there are pesticides present and you suspect or know that, I would just dispose of the used microfiber cloth. By the way, I would recommend washing the cloth before you use it so that any commercial preparation that's been added to it is removed and, again, try to purchase white so we're not dealing with dye stuff that have been added. And if you're vacuuming other kinds of materials that you don't think are pesticide treated, you can wash these and reuse them, but you can also dispose of them where pesticides might be present. Another very useful item are cosmetic sponges. These are sold in most pharmacies. They're very, very smooth. We recommend the latex-free cosmetic sponges. They're usually labeled as such. They can be trimmed to small sizes. You can just cut them with a scissor or a blade. And, again, I would clean in the direction of the feather bar, supporting the feather, and you can discard these when they're soiled. Also, very, very useful. Going farther than dry cleaning or dry dirt removal is something that I think really should be brought to the attention of the conservator. And I'd say that because of the other things I talked about earlier, about other things that you can, you know, moisture tangles up down these feathers and creates, you know, a very... an appearance that is not at all like the original appearance that you would want to preserve. Also, you know, we're starting to see more materials that are dyed and painted feathers. And the reason we're seeing a lot of that is because more recent people who are working with feathers, contemporary feather workers, are actually unable to gain access to feathers that they want to gain access to due to their legal controls. And therefore, you can be dealing with the interaction of whatever you'd be using with dyes and pigments and paints. And so I think it's really important to work with a conservator so that the appropriate testing can take place. And here's a conservation intern, a conservator, at a Natural History Museum in England. And she is, again, she's supporting the feathers and she's using water and ethanol in this particular case after doing testing to figure out safety. And here's another example. These are images from a conservator who does a lot of work on feather work and her website is at the bottom of this slide. And she was cleaning the downy feathers, the plumulaceous feathers on this warp on it, and she was using a solvent system and using these cosmetic pads. And so you can see that, you know, again, as I mentioned earlier, look at this feather warp on it. The downy feathers are absolutely attracting dirt, preferentially, to the eagle feathers behind them. So we are, you know, we are pressed to kind of, you know, she, in order to return this to a display worthy condition, this kind of treatment is definitely warranted, but again, most responsibly done by a conservator. Next I wanted to talk a bit about insect damage. And I'm showing you images here of the two likeliest culprits, at least in the United States. I'm showing you a webbing clothes moth on the top right, and I'm showing you a varied carpet beetle on the lower right. And what I can say is that the carpet beetles, actually there are a lot of variations of carpet beetles, and we in the U.S. are seeing a lot of varied carpet beetle, but the, in other parts of the world, other kinds of carpet beetles are also turning up as predators for feathers. And I wanted to point out to you that with feather damage, insect damage often looks like on feathers, is a major loss area in a whole group of barbs. So I'm hoping you can see that on the large image here, that you've got parallel losses, dapped losses that toward the tip on the right side of the screen and the grayer part of that feather, you're seeing these narrow kind of losses. And then moving toward the middle of the slide, where the transition from gray to white, you're seeing larger losses. And that's a lot of what insect damage tends to look like, but I'm also going to show you examples of other kinds of insect damage that you can identify. So first I wanted to also point out to you that it's not only feathers that are subject to insect damage. There are many materials that are close relatives of feathers like quill work, wool, silk, hair, fur, et cetera, et cetera, everything else listed. And these, too, could show this kind of damage, tell tale damage from insects. So this is another great slide produced by Molly Gleason. And these are showing examples of different forms of insect damage on feathers. On the top left and in the center and on the far right, you see exactly what I referenced earlier. You see this kind of loss of whole sections of the feather. On the left, top left, you see also what we refer to as grazing, which is where you have a superficial kind of beginning, but it looks like a sort of a movement. You can imagine the movement of the insect larva across the feather as it was, so it's quite directional. And so you see that kind of shallow, what we call grazing. On the lower left, you see particulate. That is sort of a, it's frass. It's a product called frass, which is part of the insect digestive process, and they leave evidence of their digestion on the item. And in the center, lower center, you see where the insects have preferentially gone to the shaft. They've kind of ignored the vein on either side, and they've preferentially gone into that shaft, dug in, and undermined that shaft area. So just to give you some ideas of what to be looking for. So when active tests are suspected, the first thing I would recommend that you do is enclose the featherwork in two bags. You know, first one, feel it, then a second, and feel it, and polyethylene bags are the best, they're very stable, and put the date on the exterior of the outer bag. Continue checking if you're not sure whether or not you're looking at old insect activity that's not currently ongoing. Continue to check that item, and look for changes. Look for changes because active insects are going to be producing more frass. They're going to be producing, you're going to see more debris associated with, or more losses associated with the larva. And to be moved to another step, anybody who identifies active insect pests should be thinking about the implementation of an integrated pest management program. We don't have time to talk about that right now. So there are links on the handout which will tell you about resources for integrated pest management. Also, if you currently have active pests, you should be considering nonchemical steps like freezing or anoxia treatment. Both of these have been found to be extremely successful against web enclosed moths, and in particular against carpet beetles. And again, there are links to describe that process to you. Since we don't have the time to do that right now. So moving on to breakage or mechanical damage, there are methods available to conservators for the repair and reconstruction of broken feathers. And again, the way in which we make these decisions often depends on the cultural sensitivity and also the presentation goals. So, you know, I know regalia makers who are taking care of their own feathers, and they do things like trim off damaged feathers. In the museum environment, that would be a totally inappropriate thing to do. Also, the idea of replacing feathers that have become damaged is something that we, in the case of in a museum environment, with certain indigenous materials, you cannot replace feathers with feathers from another bird. So, and you cannot access the original feathers because they're endangered. So these, they're complex questions associated with feather replacement. But typically conservators try to relax feather damage by using warm water. It introduced either to compresses or as a mist. And then apply splinting devices with the pieces to either side of the damage or running along the damage itself. And so that's also something that is, would I think be done best in consultation with a conservator. Damage from light and ultraviolet energy is definitely something that you can take charge about as any kind of caretaker, any kind of steward. Protection from excess light and ultraviolet energy is important for feathered collections, no matter what their origin is. If you are now storing or displaying featherwork opposite a light source, a window or a door that's glazed, you should really think about that positioning of featherwork. If you have windows in storage, you should think about blocking off those windows. If you have unfiltered fluorescent lights, you should think about filtering those light sources. Interestingly, so this is the two, the center and right hand image are from the Pitt Rivers Museum in England, in Oxford, England, and they had this beautiful Hawaiian cloak, a feathered cloak, completely feathered, and it's on permanent expedition. And what they decided to do was to have a velvet curtain in front of the cloak so that when somebody wants to view the cloak, the audience member has to press a button. It opens up the velvet curtain and the lights go on in the case. So there are all kinds of creative ways to limit light. Just to tell you the image on the left that I'm showing you is a scarlet-eyed feather that was part of a study that I conducted with colleagues. We masked off the center section, the red section of that feather, and we exposed the top and the bottom, well, the whole thing, but with the center masked off, we exposed it to a lot of light and some UV, and you can see the incredible color loss that occurred. So I hope that that impresses you with how important it is to protect feathers from light and ultraviolet, particularly ultraviolet. And I want to just end with a few great slides of how to store featherwork safely because I feel like if you can protect your featherwork from light and UV and you can store it well, that's more than half the battle. Acid-free materials are really important. The same Tyvek we talked about before, Epiphome and Volara, which are polyethylene foams, again, sources are on the handout. And then I just decided I would show you some examples of wonderful storage for feather collections of various sources, predominantly indigenous. So on the left you see a California feathered blanket in the National Museum of Natural History. It's stored flat, unfolded, flat, and face-up, feathers face-up on a piece of Tyvek and on Epiphome on a metal shelf. On the right are feathered items that were repatriated to the Yurok Nation, and they are all on either acid-free board pallets or the lowest one is a tray, and they're just simply flat and face-up. The detail on the top right, I believe, shows up in this slide. Again, it's a different item, but what you see here is that foam bumpers have been used to raise up the item in the areas that are not feathered so that nothing is putting pressure on the featherwork. And that's a really great, this is a very simple solution for protecting these feathered items. These are dance wands. This is an example from the COD exam, and this is an example where space would have been too great if these were unrolled and stored flat. These are macaw feathers, and instead they're put onto these trays, and there is an acid-free hollow tube that's been wrapped in Tyvek, and the headdress has been wrapped around that format with enough room in the tray for the trailing part of the featherwork. These are Hawaiian tahili in the left from the Bishop Museum. These are royal regalia from Hawaii. These are enormous. You can see the size of these feathered stands. They're stats that are carried, and they're displayed with these elaborate carved stands. At the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, those stands for the staff part, the non-feathered part, are replicated using foam, and you can see sort of a detail on the right, and the foam is starting below at the bottom of the image. But there are also sometimes the feathered parts are just wrapped in clear mylar, like a tube is made out of heavyweight clear mylar, polyester film, to protect the feathers from soiling. And then for things that are worn on the head, whether or not they're indigenous headdress regalia or fashion, it's best to store them in a format that is just like the way they would have been worn. So to create on the left is a archival tray with epiphone in it, with a sculpted form that fits underneath the feathered headdress. The center image is borrowed from Irene, our next speaker, and it's a mannequin head. It's probably not used for storage, but you can get the idea of what the support is providing. And on the right are non-feathered items that are showing you what the interior of what a very creative kind of support could look like for headdress items. In closing, I'm moving toward just showing you a final example. I believe this is my final example, and this is showing you, you know, this is the piece in the National Museum of Indian, all of these feathers are dyed. I was talking about how we're increasingly seeing dyed, you know, dyed featherwork, right? And again, in this case, just the headdress part is supported internally, and the rest of the trailing part of the featherwork is supported in this tray. So again, I just want to thank those whose images I borrowed. If you want to look at this, you most certainly can, further on. And I want to thank you and just tell you, do a little shout-out for the book that I've published together with my students last year, and it has many important points that are applicable to featherwork at large. Okay, thank you. With that, I'm going to close and turn it over to Irene. Well, hi. Thank you very much. That was wonderful. I'm going to be a little briefer about my section. My experience with feathers is somewhat limited to my collection and an exhibition that we once had about feathers. Well, about hats, actually, and that's how I came across feathers. And let's see, how am I doing this? There we go. Okay. So I'm from an art museum, and feathers found in my collection come in all different forms, but it can be a pink fuzzy jacket or an assemblage or a fan or a hat. And for the hat exhibition that we did many years ago, we had to go to our local Natural History Museum. I believe our curator and conservator asked them to come over and got them some lunch and showed them our collection and asked for what kind of feathers everything was, because that was sort of needed for our catalog, as well as when here's the term, we did have to learn about cites, which is the convention on international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora. And even if your feathers are not endangered, you still have to document them if you're going to do any kind of transportation internationally. And in the United States, our cites certificates are sort of a little harder than other countries, I believe. They're through the Fish and Wildlife and who are probably more interested in catching poachers than museum collections, so they don't actually always pay that much attention to our cites. I know I had some troubles in the exhibition bringing things in, getting inspectors to take a look. We never really want inspectors to open up our crates, but I think one of our crates did have to get opened up for hats that came from England, and the feathers were basically chicken feathers. It took us a while to figure out that. Again, cites is based on endangered species, and it's a long act, and there are some exemptions, antique exemptions, and pre-act exemptions, anything before 1973 if you can document that it was acquired before that and knew the provenance, then that would help. I would also suggest that you get in touch with an agent to do cites if you're going to do them, because I don't think I've ever actually done one myself. I always used a shipping agent, and they need to get documentation from us, documentation proof of the genus species again. If you're not a Natural History Museum, make friends with your Natural History Museum so you can identify your feathers. Interestingly, looking through my hats exhibition or through my collection, I did come across this hat that's decorated with a whole bird of paradise, which evidently is now outlawed to import, so we're not going to be transporting that anytime soon. Another agency to worry about if it's in your collection is migratory birds. I don't know a whole lot about it, but here's a link to find out what the laws are on migratory birds. Again, Fish and Wildlife is your main agency for importing and exporting feathers. Like I said, my experience with them is that they're not all that cooperative and make it... if you are doing an exhibition that's coming in and has to go out again, once you get something in with a CITES certificate, you need to start working on the export right away because it takes them a minimum of three months to get the export. I've never quite understood that, but there you go. And that's why there are certain ports in the United States that you can bring CITES works in. Not all ports are available for CITES, like I am in Philadelphia, yet I can only import into New York or Washington. Philadelphia is not a CITES port. So I didn't have that much to say about it, but I'm happy to answer any questions. Most of the images were from my museum. The hat show was a lot of fun, but it did have a lot of headaches with fish and wildlife. So it is something you need to consider if you're going to be transporting anything in or out of the United States. And thank you. Okay. I'm going to read out the questions. I'm also going to put up the evaluation link. The evaluation links are really important, so please fill out an evaluation. They help us to determine our schedules for next year and what we're going to offer and stuff like that. So thanks. And thank you both. Okay. So Cindy Opitz, I hope I said that correctly, said what solvent was used to clean the Downey feathers on that warp on it? That's for Ellen. Okay. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, because I can't, I'm sorry. I needed my phone. Okay, good. So I know in that case that isopropanol was used. And, you know, as I've mentioned, isopropanol is, you know, available as kind of rubbing alcohol in the pharmacy. And, but, but there were also elaborate steps taken after the, after the feathers had been wet up with that solvent to make sure that they were then either manipulated with gloved hands or there are other ways in which what happens when we wet down Downey feathers, polymeraseous feathers is that they end up, they look like scrawny and they totally lose their, they're lost, you know, they totally lose their fullness. And so there's usually multiple steps that are taken in the case of using any kind of solvent to recover the sort of fluffiness afterwards. So I just wanted to, you know, definitely make that point in answering that question. And also the, you know, the alcohol will, you know, if there's any sort of, I mean, we typically, we certainly do see dyed, dyed Downey feathers. We very rarely see them painted, but we certainly see them dyed. And if, in any case, you're looking at dyed feathers, there's no guarantee that the alcohol won't take it right off. Okay. These stubs we said are some types of feathers more susceptible to insect attack, or is it more due to housekeeping and environmental issues for Ellen to answer? Okay. Yeah, this is Ellen. So I can say that a really interesting bit of research that we conducted, a group of us conducted, was actually looking at the protective quality of the pigmentation that occurs on feathers. And it actually is not so much the feather itself, you know, the protein that's making up the feather itself, but the different coloration, natural colorations of feathers, some are more protective than others against insect damage. So melanin, which is where it creates the black-brown, gray coloration that we see in feathers, is actually a relatively more protective than some other colorants, you know. So if you had an item that was, that had unguided feathers, and it included some brown feathers, but it also included some bright red feathers, you might actually see that the brown feathers are more resistant to insect damage than are the red and yellow feathers. So Dee added, she wonders if this applies also to furs, you know? Well, furs don't have the same range of coloration that feathers do. Furs are pretty much, and you know, I wasn't going to, I mean, that's fine, I love talking about this, but you know, feathers have such a gamut of potential colorants that are used to produce that color, and furs, it's much more restrictive. You know, furs is pretty much melanin and porphyrins, you know, whereas feathers is like five other different things, they're meant to be used, and so it's less applicable directly to fur. But one of the things I think is really interesting is like, for example, I've seen this, and I bet others have too, that when you have dyed examples of like quill work, because we, you know, a lot of our collections include porcupine quill decoration on, you know, all kinds of supports, birch bark boxes, let's say, you know, and you can see that, or quill decoration on garments, leather garments, and you can see that insects have selectively nibbled on the ones that are dyed with certain dyes, and they've avoided the quills that are dyed with other dyes. So I think there is more work to be done. I think that would be, that's really, that's a great question and something, it's more, it's work that needs to be done. Yeah. Okay. Kathleen Christensen said, what are, what type of splints are used to repair broken shafts on feathers? So in the sort of overview that I've seen, so many different kinds of things have been used and they've been used because it depends on the weight of the feather, right? There's everything from these huge eagle feathers and turkey feathers, which are, you know, wing and tail feathers that are really big, you know, from big birds to tiny little feathers, you know, chest feathers from a duck, you know, which are, you know, fluffy little tiny feathers. So it, so keep that in mind, you know, so when we're talking about splints, we're talking about things, materials that are chosen to be appropriate to the size and the needed strength of that feather and it can be anything from cotton thread to Japanese tissue twist to pulled out strands of conservation grade adhesive to actually taking a comparable size shaft from another bird and carving out a hollow section of a shaft of another bird and applying that on. So it's a really varied kind of program of decision making that happens in considering what kind of splint to use. Okay, I'm adding a question of mine and that is, you suggested anoxia and freezing for treating pests, but what about heat treatment for pests? I know we use them a lot in the west for moss because we put them in the heat for a couple of hours and it kills everything, but it's not enough to damage the materials themselves, the cultural materials. You know, I think actually, I'm glad you brought that up, actually, Susan. I think, you know, I think heat treatment is a great option and I know that, you know, I know that there's great guidelines for heat treatment written by Thomas Strang in Canada. You know, he's done a lot of exploration of that technique. I'm not sure that there is an easy to access guide, but maybe, you know, Susan, if you know of one like a conservogram from the National Park Service or... There's one from WAC. Is there one from WAC? Yeah, I'll add it to the handout before I post it. Okay. Mary Scholar says, from time to time, I do come in contact with arrows with feathers and I appreciate the image for recommended storage. And then these stubs, Lee, said, Mary, we have feathers that are tipped with curare poisoning. Another thing to keep in mind, depending on the origin. Yep. Thank you, Lee.