Duck, goose picking a dying art in Delaware

It’s a dying art in Delaware: the ability to pick a duck or goose clean in the time it takes to read to the end of this story.

Picking houses used to be a fixture along the Delaware Bay shore – long, low buildings full of outdoorsy men and women snatching up work during the few months of duck and goose season.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when Canada geese ruled the fall and winter skies here, there were, by some estimates, as many as 12 seasonal picking houses in Delaware.

All but three are gone.

Enter Sam Brittingham.

Some years ago, Brittingham picked up two waterfowl cleaning machines – one for ducks, the other for geese – from the late Alan Pleasanton. Pleasanton was a Leipsic waterman but in the 1970s he started a side business he named Alleyoops Pickit. The picking machines were used there for many years.

Brittingham brought them to his home between Smyrna and Leipsic and put them in his garage.

“Two years ago, I had a vision,” he said. “I’m going to start picking.”

With that, some searching for hard-to-find replacement parts and a complete rebuild of both picking machines – The Naked Duck duck and goose picking service was born.

It’s a part time, seasonal business. Brittingham’s full-time job is at Carey’s Diesel in Leipsic.

“I’m not making a living doing this,” he said.

The two picking machines are the nerve center of The Naked Duck Picking room, a garage turned man cave with trophy taxidermy from deer mounts to flying geese.

The machines look like a supersized, rug beater – the kind you find inside an old-fashioned vacuum sweeper. But instead of brushes on a rotating drum, there are ribbed, rubber fingers.

As the drum rotates, the rubber fingers pull the feathers from the bird.

The key, Brittingham said, is to use the right amount of pressure to pull the feathers and not damage the flesh.

There is the same type of prep work that goes on in any butcher shop where birds are cleaned and processed. The neck and wings are removed. The bird is defeathered. Feet are removed along with the internal organs. The bird is rinsed, drained and packaged.

All told it takes about three minutes from start to finish to clean a duck or goose. It’s so fast, most customers wait and chat up the picking crew.

Ducks and geese can be picked by hand but that too, is a lost art like tatting lace trim or wrapping peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in waxed paper – the homemaking skills that our grandmothers and great grandmothers possessed.

And “it takes forever,” Brittingham said.

“Hours,” said friend and customer Steve Lee.

Folks who don’t go to a picking house, typically just pluck the feathers from the breast and breast-out the bird. There’s the loss of meat but a saving of time, Lee said.

He prefers to go to the Naked Duck. First off, he said, he and Brittingham are both Smyrna boys and they picked ducks together when they were young. Second, he said, is the camaraderie among duck hunters. And third, he wants Brittingham to get the feathers.

Suppose you have four or five guys out for a morning of duck hunting and they each bag their limit of six ducks. That’s a lot of ducks to clean, he said. And for snow geese, the limit is higher, still: 25 birds.

The cost: $2 for a duck; $3 for a goose.

He separates and sells the down to a buyer from New York but with high tech, insulated fibers, the price of down isn’t what it used to be, Brittingham said.

And this year has been a little off. With the warm December, the big influx of waterfowl didn’t come until three weeks ago, he said.

What Brittingham does at The Naked Duck – with the help of guys like Steven Scuse, Bill Harding and Charlie Jachimowski – is called dry picking.

At big poultry processing facilities they typically use a wet process that involves hot water and steam, Brittingham said.

He looked at one of those machines but at $6,000 a pop, he decided to stick with Alan Pleasanton’s tried and true dry pickers.

Even so he doesn’t make much money.

“I don’t charge an arm and a leg,” he said. “My nickname is nice guy.”

Contact Molly Murray at 463-3334 or mmurray@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @MollyMurraytnj.