Am I getting a little obsessive about seeing the world as potential fly tying materials?
I hit the Fred Meyer after Christmas sales table and picked up lots of cool mylar tensil. Half price! A lot of it has holographic prisms in little triangles of rainbow colors. Greens, reds, silver, gold, but I'm especially fond of this shiny brown stuff and the crinkly brown stuff. I'm going to try it on some olive zonker bodies.
I was riding with my boss as we zoomed out to a job sight. I got excited when spotted a road kill rabbit on the side of the road but he wouldn't stop. Imagine that!
Saturday my new wife and I were driving Klickitat heights looking at property when I spotted a dead doe on the shoulder of the road. This time I was driving. I fought the ravens off and got a bucktail!
I think that there is a law that prevents you from doing that sort of thing. Don't let a Game Warden catch you. You can also go to Craft stores. You can find oodles of things to use for tying flies. Jim S. EVIL
I do the same thing. I've talked about the scrounging roadkill but I have never done that. I worry about the disease some of these dead critters may carry ie Lyme Disease, Rabbies, and even Anthrax. Bucktail, squirel tail, and rabbit masks are pretty cheap anyhow so I buy them. I did just get a bunch of nice pheasant tail and body feathers from some hunting I did over my X-mas trip to Michagan (plus 5 birds in my freezer).
My cat makes some pretty good dubbing fur. He is a maine **** and has nice downy fur for stoneflys and caddis nymphs. I have talked to other folks who use there pet dogs, cats and rabbits for tying materials
I got a bag of blue heron feathers from a dead bird found on the side of the river drying in the garage.
I will use my dog's tail for wing material.
I have been eye balling the cockatiel feathers. Just wish he was a little bigger. His feathers are a bit small for spey flies.
I have used dead coyote fur found along side the hyway.
I was given all the feathers plucked from a wild turkey. I haven't used any yet but it is just a matter of time.
I have bags full of mallard, pin tail, widgen and other duck's feathers from hunting.
I have several whole pheasant skins given to me by hunting friends.
I have a collection of crow feathers from an unfortunate encounter one had with my shot gun while he was poking around in my wife's garden. Haven't used any of those yet either.
Yo guys, do not repeat do not use material from dogs or coyote. The Bio's in the State of Orgeon did a bit of testing on what critters terrified the anadramous fishies the most and it was CANINES not kitty's. Tip on scrounging, go to the nearest freddy meyer or craft store and pick up those cute little dime size puff balls with mylar twinkies in purple, orange or hot pink. Slide em on the hook with some Zap-A-Gap or needle em down on your tippet to the hook, they are excellent chump change extra zesty versions of glow bugs. They are Steelhead candy.
grip and grin :WINK
Just thought i would let you know Mr. rockfish that it is elegal to shoot song birds ,( robbins,sparrows,gold finches(state bird)
sea gulls and spotted owls)
P.S. Your secret is safe with me but I wouldn't tell to many people. :WINK
I heard an interesting presentation from the guys working at the Cle Elum hatchery (Schroeder, et al.) on the question of evaluating hatchery vs. wild production. In one experimental design, reproductive and return success in spring chinook is being compared between traditional hatchery practices and new rearing techniques to make them more wild. As part of the semi-wild treatment (SNT), the fish are exposed to various predators to see if they can be conditioned to avoid them after release and therefore survive better than the normal dumb hatchery fry that hopes that any big silhouette on the side of the stream might be throwing them some feed pellets. When they put mergansers into a raceway, they saw an immediate and strong avoidance, even in naïve fish. Fish that had never seen a bird before in their short life. It seemed they have an innate recognition and abhorrence of the shape and smell of some bird predators, of mergansers at least.
I was just reading a book by Dave Hughes and he advises smell your wax and don't use a wax with a strong smell especially in your wet flies because he thinks the fish will avoid them by smell. This got me thinking: What about the smell of the heron in all those hot steelhead patterns. What about the duck feathers? What about the otter dubbing? Or Bear hair? Or dog hair? A Klickitat biologist was just telling me that he works hard to keep his lab out of the water when he's fishing because he's seen the fish immediately go off a hatch from the dog smell. Maybe I should use all synthetics and soak them in Ode de OMP (Oregon Moist Pellet).
This spring, they'll be trying otters at the Cle Elum hatchery.
I have used fur and feathers from otter, seal, polar bear, black bear, heron, dog, and other predators for years. I have caught steelhead on flies with materials from one or more of the above tied into them. I believe what you say. I just wonder how concerned one should be.
Hey Stumpfisher, I'm right behind you on the kook part, but lets not go near the gun control issue, it's the lunatic behind the gun, not "the gun". Sling shots, stick box traps and blow guns would take the place for these nuts even if they didn't have a gun. It is rather perverse to indisrciminately kill non-game (or poach game for that matter) under thr ruse of aquiring fly tying material. Over the years I've noticed that the folks who are "thrill killers" are very unstable. There's plenty of excellent material around-- cheap-free or just for the asking-- that will make a perfectly good fly. I am an ardent hunter of both birds and big game and truly enjoy a good day in the field as much as a good day on the river.
grip and grin :HMMM
You just got to be careful with the seal cause they make a lot of noise. but make good reel covers thou. no I'm just foolin around, didnt mean to ruffle any feathers :THUMBSUP
I stated gun control, NOT a gun ban or gun confiscation. I am a Jeffersonian at heart and would never agree to such a taking. But I also believe that there is wingle room for all sides on the issue of controlling access to guns for those deemed undesireable by just laws and/or demands of the people.
Although I no longer hunt, hunting still calls to me each Fall. It was the inability to hunt when I lived on the East Coast which drove me to taking up the fly. No, I solidly support lawful gun ownership yet that does not blind me to the consequences of guns in the wrong hands. Good gun control is desperately needed in the U.S. and I am afraid that those advocates of no controls will not move on the gun issue and are going to lose a say in the outcome. Rigidity to compromise may well spell the doom for reasonable controls versus the overbearing restrictions as some support.
And KOOKS making such statements about killing everything that crosses paths with him continues the image of slob hunter and begs for regulatory controls.
Now if I was to take up hunting again, I would probably go the route of archery, the bow, but probably not taking the kill. It's not the kill that I like (same as in my fishing) its the other intangibles that I seek.
My all-time greatest score on materials was when my brother-in-law was awarded one of the few moose permits in Washington. He clipped off a nice supply of moose main which I've used for tail material ever since.
In fact, I tie a fly I call the "All Washington Emerger":
Tail: Moose Mane from moose shot in WA
Body: Muskrat fur a trapper from Wenatchee gave me
Rib: Copper wire from hardware store in WA (???)
Hackle: Hungarian Partridge shot in the Yakima Canyon area.
Now THAT is what fly-tying is all about. Makes me a little ashamed of my attempts to throw some Baribie hair in the fur blender with some muskrat and beaver to make a seal substitute. :WINK
I'd sure like to get a Hun. A blue grouse too. It's been about 30 years since I hunted birds, but maybe I'll have to start if I can't hit them with my car. :BIGSMILE And I have so many quail around my office, you'd think at least one would fly into the window. All I got so far from the windows was one little junco. I used his white outer tail feathers for a few thorax wings, and they were very whispy. They probably soak up water however.
Bought about 45 - 50 roosters last year with about 45 hens. Got a real mix with a lot of barred feathered ones. Since I will only be tying steelhead sized flies I found out I should have just bought white hens and dye the feathers myself.
Got several Toulouse geese for material but they're such characters I won't be able to harvest the feathers by killing them - they think I'm Daddy and follow me around like young puppies. And you can't just pluck one or two feathers from them without duking it out with them, Daddy notwithstanding.
Got a young Hereford bull and Angus heifer who have both decided that I am persona-non-gratia when I come near them with the scissors. My wife's horse has the best tailhair, sorrel in color and touches the ground. The stuff would make most excellent tail material and he would give it up without a fight. I'm looking for some hair patterns...
All this material and mostly unusable without some altercation within the farmyard. I guess I've gone too soft for real farmer. Naw, it is far easier to just have the wife pick me up material when she heads down-river (besides, the old girl always picks me up something nice and unexpected - why ruin a good thing?).
I was just looking through the junk pile and wondered how that braided wire hydraulic line would work for zonker bodies. It would make them more jig-like. (wink)
As long as we're talking about weird materials, thought I'd share my story of the "electric tape chironomid". I was fishing Chopaka in the the early 80's, and saw this local guy in an old rowboat hooking fish after fish on a day when nobody else was doing well. I ran into him at the boat launch and he showed me his fly - black electrical tape wrapped around a #6 bait hook. No tail, rib, hackle, or even tying thread! He said, "I'm not a fly fisherman or a fly tier, but I saw the flies they were selling at the sporting goods store & figured I could do as well. I can't cast, so I just toss these out a ways & let them sit."
Naturally I ran back to the car, found a roll of tape, stripped a few old flies and "tied" some. The next day the fish hammered them! When I got home, I searched the hardware stores for different colors of tape - found black to be the most effective. This guy had actually discovered chironomid fishing before it became so popular!
Of course I now tie the same kind of chironomid patterns that everybody else uses. Sometimes I wonder.....
Hi scroungers all,
I'm on the list of those who look at things with a different use in mind. I've always had a side hobby of taxidermy, on a very amature basis. It's almost impossibe for me to drive by road kill without stopping. Fact, I saw a good size racoon late this afternoon. My wife bought me an old refer a long time ago that we used to keep outside the back door. She got tired of the frozen rats, moles, rabbits,etc. in our kitchen fridge.
I heard a story once about a fly tier that lived up the Skagit or Stilly, not sure which. Tale has it that he would drive up river to his favorite fishing hole and every time he found road kill on the way there he would get out and spray white paint around the unfortunate critter. Then on the way back home he would pick up all the ones that didn't have the paint ring. He knew those were the fresh ones. Ha! Now where was that raccoon?
UNNO Flyfisher Frank
The Fred Meyer Christmas sale garlands have worked out well for streamer bodies. The crinkly mylar ones have these ¼ inch wide strides that are solid for about three inches then sliced into a ½ or ¾ in. section of 1/32 wide fringe. So I tie the fringe section in at the bend leaving a little tail, wrap the solid section forward to the eye and I have a muddler or streamer body. I have crinkly metallic brown, red, silver, and green.
Maybe I should cut the garlands into 3-inch sections, bag them, and put them on the materials rack for $2.85 each.
:WINK
Let's see: a doe with a bucktail, posessing parts of wildlife without a proper license or tag, using feathers from birds that are illegal to kill, knowing that dead animals can cary parasites that can infest any quality materials you may own, and beleiving anything anyone at a hatchery tells you is true? WOW! And Just how many of you have gotten tying advice from a Fred Myer's? MG, I think you need to go over to Gary's Fly Shoppe and repent.
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