According to trade bodies, most feathers are a byproduct of the meat industry. Eiders do not naturally nest in such large colonies, but will congregate close to human settlements to seek shelter and protection. His Danish wife, Edda, welcomed me in, the sound of choir music blending with the roar of an eiderdown dryer in a barn outside. He related that he received ten bags of down as part of the tax from the most distinguished Sami in the area. SHOW MORE. You can probably count on an adult duvet costing you about NOK 40,000 to 50,000 today, but they are popular despite the price. He began to read about it and even travelled to Iceland on a research trip. I used to be a night watchman, so I have a little bit of experience staying awake.”. The saga mentions that lendmann Thorolf Kveldulvsson from the Sandnes farmstead sent his people out to the egg nests – among other places – in the late 800s. Later, as we made our way back to the church, the pastor let out a cry and pointed to a nest that he had missed during the previous gathering. Personal information we receive is not used for purposes other than responding to the inquiry. Brash creatures, their boldness inspires admiration in the Icelanders. In order for us to be able to send e-mail, you must register an e-mail address. The "Share with others" feature can be used to forward links to the site by email, or to share the content of social networking. However, we can not guarantee that the online community does not log this information. In a cafe in Ísafjörður, the pastor explained how he harvests eiderdown. Photo: NTNU She is currently a professor in the Department of Archaeology and Cultural History at the NTNU University Museum.

Tips for tips are not logged with us, but only used to add the tips to the community. “Sixty-five years, 50 nights every spring,” he said, as if considering a mathematical problem. We ask for the name of the sender and contact information for this. The archipelago was listed in 2004. Bound in red leather, it recorded the number of ducks that had come to his farm over five decades. On the pastor’s land, the eider, too, makes herself vulnerable for her offspring, although it is down, not blood, that she draws from her breast. Research news written for the general public about technology, energy and environment, science, fish and aquaculture, innovation, health, the social sciences and humanities.

(Today in Northumberland, the eider is sometimes called St Cuthbert’s or Cuddy duck.) Worse, the disappearance of Iceland’s white-tailed eagle, which almost went extinct in the 1960s, has been attributed partly to the activities of eiderdown farmers. Become a Longreads Member for just $3 per month. “I always take a lot of flags with me and I put a flag beside each nest so I will be able to find it again.
Despite the military uniform, glasses and talk of guns, he never actually described killing a fox. This is the finest down in the world and we are exporting it in black garbage bags.”. In an adaptation from his forthcoming book, Harvest: The Hidden Histories of Seven Natural Objects at The Guardian, Edward Posnett reports on the give-and-take relationship eider ducks have with human harvesters in Iceland. The world is getting smaller.” But I did feel sad, thinking that this tradition might disappear. During nesting season, Harvesters keep watch against predators, collecting the down only after the ducks and their young have left. It’s quite messy when she gets it. Every season, the ducks came, and their down was harvested and shipped off to the middlemen for a stable price, much as has been done for centuries. In earlier times, collecting eggs and feathers from nests was common in Norway. As part of his parish duties, he runs a small farm, a throwback to earlier times when pastors in remote areas would survive off the land. “The eider is an unsung hero, far braver than any bird of prey, which it is known to attack to protect its offspring,” one local told me. A retired maths teacher, Valdimar has lived in the fjord for seven decades. Like the beached whale, the ducks in Valdimar’s fjord were a finite and highly valued resource; any gain by a farmer in eiderdown would be offset by another’s loss. What can this unique relationship teach us? Every now and then, researchers are lucky enough to experience a Eureka moment — when a series of facts suddenly crystallize into a an entirely new pattern. Eiderdown duvets are still manufactured from the collected down. An eiderdown cleaning harp is used to separate out the down from other nest materials. “Heat,” she said. The farmers remove the down from the nest leaving enough to keep the eggs warm. Handling the boat with expert care, Alexíus guided us across the narrow stretch of water, scattering the seabirds on its surface. Arctic terns attacking all the time. Rendered rubbery by rainfall, their fragments were proof of what the pastor had said; he always allowed the ducklings to hatch before collecting their bedding. “I never collect the down until they are gone,” he said. Yet there was another presence, one that silently haunted the harvesters’ imaginations, fed by novels or television: the men and women of ambition who wore the jackets or slept under the duvets. He wedged his stick under the down, easing it gently from the grass, and picked it up. I was late for the eiderdown season, but the pastor offered to lead me around the land and re-enact his summer ritual as he had done for the Japanese film crew.
Department of Archaeology and Cultural History, Place names describe Scandinavia in the Iron and Viking Ages, Viking Age mortuary house found in central Norway, Roman bronze cauldron unearthed in central Norway burial cairn, configure your browser to accept / reject cookies. At night, I would listen to their high-pitched calls from my tent, my dreams populated with images of small children at play. Today, Valdimar said, there are only 1,500 nests. The Icelanders, he believed, had some sort of special ability to understand ducks that verged on the mystical. What can this unique relationship teach us? Legislation to encourage their extermination dates back to 1295, and even today each community in Iceland is obliged to hire a fox killer to visit all known dens in the area to exterminate their occupants. These duvets are naturally expensive. Looking for eider nests is organised in a manner so that people walk in a line 5 to 15 meters apart through the colony.

As an important part of the effort to create a user-friendly website, we look at the user pattern of those who visit the site. Many of these stories were built upon embellishment or pure fantasy, but in Iceland, travellers’ accounts repeatedly confirmed the existence of this strange relationship between Icelanders and the ducks. “The significance of the coastal communities in the Viking Age is evident from Egil’s Saga,” says Berglund. “It’s like a family thing,” Alexíus said. Adapted from Harvest: The Hidden Histories of Seven Natural Objects by Edward Posnett, published by The Bodley Head on 8 August and available at guardianbookshop.com. People in the coastal villages have harvested eider duck eggs and down, and fished and hunted seals, but Berglund’s greatest interest lies with the practice of eider farming. “I always take a lot of flags with me and I put a flag beside each nest so I will be able to find it again. Last modified on Wed 10 Jun 2020 03.26 EDT, In Ísafjörður, the capital of Iceland’s remote Westfjords region, a Lutheran pastor compared eiderdown to cocaine.


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