Out in the frost-bitten fjords that span Iceland’s northern shore, snow-capped cliffs rise high above an Arctic tundra, where gentle waves lap upon a rocky shoreline and sea-run brown trout swim upstream through glacial meltwater. The fjords let in the sea and bring in life. All around, a ubiquitous green moss carpets volcanic rock, like a verdant sponge broken only by the ivory white pelts of arctic foxes and secluded wooden shacks. The shacks contain the fleeting memories of Iceland’s early economic history, where its largest exports were salted cod and sheep’s wool. Today, many of the shacks have been left to rot as fish farms reduced the need for wild-caught cod, and the global market found synthetic alternatives to wool, but others have been repurposed.
In the case of Árni Örvarsson, his family’s old shack amongst the icy fjords offers not only economic prosperity but an opportunity to preserve one of Iceland’s most ancient and lucrative trades. Árni, owner of Icelandic Eider, tends his ground like a shepherd but it's not sheep that graze his land; it’s a lustrous, fat Arctic bird called an eider duck.
“I’m the youngest eiderdown farmer in probably the world, at least in Iceland,” Árni said, “There’s only me and one other lady in her sixties who are making a real volume of products.”
In 2017, Árni was playing center-back for UMF Sindri, a professional soccer league in Iceland, when he suffered a herniated disc. Slipped discs are usually routine injuries but when Árni failed to recover after surgery, he was forced to give up his ambitions as a professional soccer player and retire early. Stranded in his mid-twenties and searching for a new career, he bounced from sales job to sales job until he took his marketing skills to his fiance’s family business. As an eiderdown farmer, Árni could tend the valley, cultivate the ground for breeding eider, and keep a dying Icelandic tradition alive.
“I always knew I wanted to work for myself and do things my way,” Árni said, “The down talks the talk, but it also walks the walk. Eiderdown is the best insulation in the world, hands down.”
A single eiderdown duvet can sell for as much as $5,000. A full eiderdown parka can fetch just as much and a standard, medium-fill eiderdown pillow can run $3,600. As Árni puts it, there’s nothing quite like eiderdown and that’s because the common eider is not your common duck.
The Anatomy of Warmth
Árni sat in his computer chair, somewhere in the middle of Icelandic nowhere, as he explained to me the nuances of eiderdown farming and eiderdown insulation. Behind him, a fully stretched and tanned reindeer hide was plastered to the wall. Árni shot that bull last season, in the remote tundra of his home country. I was admiring the hide and the water-colored painting of a nesting pair of common eider next to it when Árni pulled out a wad of eiderdown.
“Warmth is air. Air is warmth,” Árni said.
The down sat upright in his hand like a spongy glob of dryer lint, except it retained its figure and compressed and decompressed as he squeezed it in his hand. The whole mass was about the size of Árni’s head but weighed just five grams.
As an Icelander, Árni knows all about staying warm. On his home turf on the north end of the island, average winter temperatures hover around 14 °F. That kind of cold is unforgiving, and to live in Iceland, warmth means survival. That’s why common eiders, who have abandoned their normal migratory behavior to become year-round residents of Iceland, have evolved a form of extreme insulation using modified down feathers to capture air and, you guessed it, warmth.
Árni calls it wool on steroids because it's far more insulative than snow-goose down, conventional wool, or any other material on the market. The reason lies in the microanatomy of the down feathers, which differs from all other birds.
“It clings together like velcro and no other down does this,” Árni said as he flexed and stretched the wad of eiderdown in his hands.
Picture a feather you’re familiar with. You may conjure up a wing feather, rigid and stout, slightly flexible but strong. You may conjure up a contour feather, the ones you see wisping around in the spring breeze that you also tie flies with. Each of those feathers has a base called a calamus, a main stem called a rachis, and hundreds of barbs that come off of it, which give the feathers their shape. The barbs cling to each other like velcro, held together by micro hooks called barbules. The hooks attach to neighboring barbules and that’s why you can peel the feather barbs apart in your hand but never put them back together.
Now, imagine eiderdown. Eiderdown is a modification of the feathers you’re familiar with. It covers the entire body of an eider and lies just beneath the contour feathers. Under a microscope, you’ll find that the calamus is stunted, growing just barely enough to even be noted. Then, from that feather base, hundreds of barbs radiate outwards. They’re long and delicate like strands of yarn and they splay out in all directions, giving the feather a 3D geometry in which each barb contains many more barbules. Held upside down, a plume of eiderdown holds the shape of a squid, with a stubby body and ten times as many legs. Just like the wad of eiderdown that Árni showed me, a single plume of eiderdown acts as a ball of insulation, capturing and trapping air between its hundreds of barbs, and therefore, heat.
It’s that extreme manipulation of geometry and anatomy that makes eiderdown such a precious commodity when compared to other feathers. But that’s only part of what makes an eiderdown duvet cost $6,000. Not only is there nothing like eiderdown, but it’s extremely rare, and farming it takes time, backbreaking labor, and a keen sense of stewardship.
Feathers Richer than Gold
Male common eiders appear molded out of wax. Each of their feathers are silky smooth, completely indistinct from each other, and covered in a thin film of slick, water-repelling oil. Just like penguins and puffins, common eider have adopted the characteristic black and white plumage of polar environments. The only difference is that they have a strange and robust bill that tapers directly to the top of their foreheads, specifically evolved for plucking mussels, clams, and crabs from rocky Arctic shorelines. Females are a drab brown, with dark and highlighted feather tips. If you ever see a common eider in the wild, you will not confuse it with other ducks. Unlike the mallard we are all familiar with, common eiders are huge and males average about five pounds. For comparison, a typical mallard drake weighs just half of that.
Around April and May, common eider congregate in huge colonies on the Arctic tundra and begin to nest. On the North Shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, near the US-Canadian border, there are as many as 20,000 eider pairs that return year after year. In Iceland, the birds stay year-round. In a mutual relationship between eiders and humans, eiderdown farmers protect vulnerable nesting eiders from a suite of predators, including seagulls, Arctic foxes, and invasive mink. The eider associate the farmers with protection and establish their farms as a sanctuary where they nest year after year. In return, farmers like Árni, who manages 3,500 nests on his property, harvest the down feathers they use to line their nests.
“When we get tourists around the sanctuary, I joke and refer to myself as a mafia boss because we take care of the ducks in our area, and in turn, they give us their down,” Árni said.
Eider hens molt down feathers from the breasts which creates a brood patch, an area of featherless skin that eider females use to keep their eggs warm. Along with their shedded down, eider nests include materials as native and foreign as seaweed, grass, twigs, and debris washed up from shore. From an aerial view, they’re hard to miss. Eider nests look like dun-colored pillows scattered across the green Icelandic valleys. In each of those nests, a female eider will lay four to five eggs and incubate them for 24 days until they hatch.
“They will hatch within an hour of each other,” Árni said, “Within 24 hours, they will dry, and they will leave the nest with their mother. They will never return.”
Once the ducklings leave the nests, Árni and his team of harvesters go around the whole property and collect the down. Other times, however, Árni will collect the down late in incubation. To do so, he lifts the ducks up off the nest and, because of their close relationship with humans, the females generally don’t mind. He gathers the down, replaces the nest with an artificial bed of hay, and returns the eggs and the hen to incubate. The process has been supported by researchers from the University of Iceland, who demonstrated that this method had no impact on the survival or hatchability of eiderdown nests.
Once harvested, the down needs to be purified from the seaweed, debris, contour feathers, and countless other unwanted materials used to build the nest. It’s a tall task for farmers such as Árni, who does the whole process on his own, and it begins with exposing the down to high temperatures for 12 to 14 hours. That process dries the down before its initial cleaning. Árni and his team pry apart and pick at tufts of eiderdown by hand, like plucking fleas from dog fur. The down is then baked for four days at 266 degrees Fahrenheit, rotated through three other machines to remove remaining unwanted debris, and then hand cleaned again. The final cleaning takes a single skilled worker six to eight hours for every two pounds of down. At last, the down goes through its final handwash. The whole process from harvest to shipping takes three and a half months.
Only about 6,000 pounds of eiderdown are harvested throughout Iceland per year, making the product scarcer than gold, platinum, diamonds, and, according to Icelandic Eider’s website, the yearly supply of Rolls-Royces. The sheer scarcity, manpower, and effort put into harvest, and year-round relationship eiderdown farmers maintain with the wild eider, make eiderdown an expensive and rare product, worth every bit of its $150 per pound. But eiderdown also embodies a cultural symbol. In a country where more than 80% of its power comes from renewable energy, eiderdown serves as an example of sustainability-based stewardship, where the value of the resource relies on the survival of the eider duck.
In fact, the common eider has been afforded special protections in Iceland since 1847, when harvest of the species was banned. That type of legislation not only reflects the value of eider to modern Icelandic culture, but also the relationship between man and eider that stems all the way back to the first arrival of humans in Iceland.
Eiderdown: A Nordic Treasure
Eiderdown has been a valued commodity since at least the eighth century, and today, archaeologists continue to dig up ancient, high-status Viking burials containing pillows and quilts stuffed with eiderdown across Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and other Nordic countries. To the ancient seafaring people of Scandinavia, the common eider meant survival. The eider provided meat, eggs, and groves of pillowy down that the ancient Scandinavians could use to stuff their clothing and blankets. Ultimately, it allowed Scandanavians to persist and thrive in brutal polar environments.
As time passed, eiderdown grew as a lucrative trade product. It was used to pay off tax collectors. It was stuffed in duvets and gifted to kings and traded among nations. Eiderdown became a status symbol in Victorian-era England at a time when beaver-fur coats and mink-fur shawls were all the rage on the streets, eiderdown duvets were the signature sign of wealth in the bedroom.
Árni’s fiance's family had owned and operated their eiderdown farm in Iceland since the 1940s. Six years ago, they passed the farm down to Árni and his fiance, who are now exploring ways to carry the ancient trade into the modern world.
“Eiderdown keeps you super, super, warm, but keeps the weight down, because eiderdown is the lightest and warmest down in the world” Árni said, “So why not use it in a sleeping bag and a jacket even?”
This year, Árni launched his new brand, Ducking Warm. His ambitions with Ducking Warm are to stray away from the traditional eiderdown markets, which include lavish duvets and pillows, and give his buyers something with more utility, like jackets and sleeping bags. The brand is expected to fully launch in the fall of 2023.
A remote gravel road traces the icy fjord near Icelandic Eider’s property. It runs through fields of ubiquitous green and sporadic groves of lupine flowers, which glow purple and blue, white and lavender, in an otherwise desolate landscape. Among the glacial meltwater and the flowers and the moss, thousands of dun-colored pillows dot the landscape, and it's telling the story of that landscape, the feathers, and the eider duck it comes from; that’s Árni’s favorite part of being a farmer.
“In a hundred years, two hundred years, this industry will just be history. Which is kind of sad, but that’s one of the reasons we're doing what we’re doing. We’re making these new products and getting younger people excited about the eiderdown,” Árni said, “That’s probably the biggest joy I get out of this whole industry. When you experience an eiderdown duvet or an eiderdown jacket for yourself, and I see the look on your face, that’s when I’m like ‘yes, now you know what I mean.”
