having worked on feathers for quite a while, I have finally achieved something I’m happy with! 
Crits and comments welcome
Crits and comments welcome
Looks amazing! How did you do it (I’m new here so I want to know more about it)?
You just have to create alpha maps and a particle system
Adding a Particle System
Add an emitter (the thing that will have feathers) and a plane -
taper one end of the plane in edit mode, add a loopcut in the middle and raise it a bit -
this just adds some depth to the feather.
For the particle system, select the object you want to have feathers, then go to the particle menu.
Click add particle system > Hair then go down to render
Here you will see some buttons that say none, path, object, group.
Click Object, and select the plane you added earlier.
You should see the feathers come up immediately.
You can play with the hair settings now to make the feathers to your taste. 
note children of the particles (children > interpolated) are better than having lots of particles,
say if you wanted 5000 feathers, you could just have 1000 particles and 5 children in render
Mapping:
Alpha Maps (tutorial) http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Textures/Use_Alpha_for_Object_Transparency
Bump maps (just enable ‘Normal’ in the texture settings)
and of course colour maps - easy enough to make in gimp,
just paint over the saved alpha map, create a new texture, add the colour image, and enable colour (default)
*note - you should play with the bump maps depending on what sort of feather you want - i.e. hard/soft
Sorry if I’ve confused you a bit or you already know how to do some of this