The Unsung Starling
What’s true for beetles also holds for ants. Most anglers stick with foam or deer-hair patterns in the mistaken belief trout only look up for terrestrials, but sunken ants catch lots of trout. Ants range from large to tiny, and so should your imitations. The easiest way to get the ant profile is to tie two bumps of thread, leaving a bare metal hook between the bumps. It helps to vary the colors of the bumps. Red or gray at the back and black at the front are the most common configurations. Solid ginger, all red, and all black are also effective.
For convenience, tie your ants in batches. After you wrap the thread bumps, leave enough bare metal between them to keep the five-minute epoxy from running together while the fly is on a rotating fly drier. Once the epoxy has hardened, wrap your tying thread over the bare metal and wrap a collar of starling at the midsection to imitate legs. The soft, dark starling fibers impart plenty of squirmy action during the drift. Use the lighter underwing feathers for the brighter ants. Sunken Ants (#12-16) work well for wary trout. Plop them down near streamside brush or dead-drift them through a medium-fast riffle and see what happens. You can also tie other effective terrestrials with starling such as Vince Marinaro’s Jassid.
Anglers long ago learned the trick of pounding up summer trout with hackled spiders tied on short-shank hooks. These flies skate, bounce, and dance on their stiff hackle tips, and trout sometimes lose all caution while chasing them across the top of the water. Unfortunately, trout often miss completely or come loose because of poor hook-ups. Then there’s the related problem of hopelessly twisted tippets, even when you use a loop knot. If you want to catch fish instead of standing there feeling like a circus master with uncooperative animal performers, switch to a Squirmy.
Squirmies are variations of the venerable Stewart’s Spider. The original pattern calls for a body of black thread and a starling or black hen hackle tied in behind the eye and wound backward about 2/3 of the way down the shank. Once you secure and clip the hackle tip, you wiggle-waggle the tying thread through the palmered feather to secure it without trapping fibers against the shank.
The problem with the original version is soft-hackles usually mat down against the hook in fast water, where these flies work best. The solution is to tie in the hackle feather at the eye (curved side up), and dub a tapered body up and then back down the shank. Have the tying thread waiting about 2/3 of the way down the hook, and reverse-wind the hackle feather to that point. Secure the
hackle tip and then work the tying thread through the fibers until you reach the hook eye. Whip-finish, clip the feather tip at the rear, and the fly is done. For a neater-looking fly, add a tiny wisp of dubbing to the thread before winding it back up through the fibers. Black is the best producer, but green, red, pale orange, and white will work.
The Squirmy series of flies are intended for fast riffles and tumbling pocketwater. They work because they trigger a snatch-it-or-lose-it response from a trout that sees a big, meaty, wriggling morsel tumbling down the chute half-drowned, and only inches from the surface. Unlike a bouncing, high-stepping spider dancing on the water’s broken surface, the slightly damp or sunken fly is easier for the trout to nail, and they clobber these patterns with far better accuracy. Train yourself to look 10 feet behind the fly. You’ll often see trout flash off the bottom or boil behind the fly just before the strike.
Late summer brings Slate Drakes (Isonychia bicolor), which trout really love. The pattern I use to match these fast-swimming insects is tied on a stout #10-12, 1X- or 2X-long wet-fly hook. Use black ostrich herl or Antron (or both) for a trailing shuck, dub an abdomen of claret imitation seal counterwound with black thread, and add a thorax of black fur or peacock herl. Use a larger, white-tipped starling feather for the hackle collar, but keep it sparse. Many starling feathers have light tan ticking on their edges and closely resemble the leg coloring of an Isonychia. For faster, deeper runs, you can tie the pattern with a black tungsten bead and an abdomen of fine Wapsi Ultra Wire. Isonychia nymphs are good swimmers, so you can fish either version with a little zip added to the retrieve. Pause and drop the rod tip after each series of strips. Trout often take the fly just after you pause.
Many major suppliers sell whole starling skins for $5 to $7—a bargain when compared to Hungarian partridge skins, hen capes, or jungle cock. You can also harvest a few birds with skeet loads in late February or early March, when the winter plumage is at its best. Use Ziploc sandwich bags to store the plucked feathers by size and color, a step that can be a time saver at the vise.
Too few anglers appreciate the value of old-fashioned wet flies. Trying to keep up with the latest “killer” dry or emerger patterns is fine if you like reading and tying more than you like hooking fish, but wets get the job done even when trout are gulping duns in the frenzy of a hatch. Presentation may not be everything, but it’s at least 90 percent of the game. Put a fly where it belongs and get it to mimic a struggling insect, and the fish will take care of the rest. Starlings are not likely to make the endangered species list anytime soon, and though they remain the bane of farmers and orchardmen, their feathers ought to have a place at your tying table.
Joe Cambridge is a teacher and writer. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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