The honking pillows

Early this week I had caught Snowflake, one of my geese, and was holding him when I noticed that he was molting. His wing feathers were not loose yet, but his down was. We had been talking about plucking the geese for their down when they molted for some time, but had never really done anything. As being plucked is at it's worst very annoying for the goose and at the end the gooses pride is hurt more than his body it really is okay to pluck a live goose, especially since you only pluck the down under their wings and on their breast. We caught Mr. Winston Goose and decided to pluck him first. His down came out easily and what he disliked more than having his fluff pulled out was having to lay on his back on my knees for about 15 minutes. We were able to fill a plastic shopping bag about 1/3 full and a small paper bag up to the top with Winston's down. Next we plucked Snowflake, who greatly disliked having to lay on his back while his feathers where pulled out. We ended up putting my sister's coat over his head and after that he quieted down considerably. The last goose we did that day was Mr. Queen, a gander, who had already started molting several weeks ago and was getting new wing feathers. He didn't like being plucked very much either, but he was a lot nicer about it that Snowflake was. At the end of that day we had a small paper bag and one fairly large shopping bag full of white goose down.
The next day we had school, but the day after that we caught King Konk and plucked him. He didn't like it one bit but that was because we were holding on to him and not letting him go over to his goslings like he wanted, not as much because we were removing most of his down. I don't know how many geese it will take to make a pillow, but I figure that if we pluck all of the geese we should have enough down for at least one pillow.