Crane Flies
Crane flies are the Rodney Dangerfields of insects. They don’t get no respect from folks who mistake them for giant mosquitoes. They don’t get no respect from fly fishermen unaware of their importance. And they don’t get no respect from entomologists who see no money in them.
Crane flies belong to the family Tipulidae, a name that stems from tippula, the Latin for water spider, and there can be little doubt that trout take the traditional spider dry fly for an adult crane fly. Crane flies range from the tropics to Greenland, and they have even been found at elevations as high as 11,000 feet. About a third of the species is aquatic with the larvae living in streams and ponds. Most of the other larvae live in moist land environments such as damp soil or decaying vegetation.
Life Cycle
Crane flies spend the better part of a year in the larval stage. Soft-bodied and wrinkled, the aquatic larvae look like translucent maggots, and they vary in color from dirty white to green and brown. Some larvae are predaceous, but whether in water or on land, the majority are detrivores (detritus eaters) and play a significant role in the processing of leaf litter, an enormous but generally unrecognized transfer of energy.
Sluggish in movement, the aquatic larvae commonly live and feed beneath accumulations of dead leaves in rivers or streams or on land. Some larvae live in the silt and fine sand in the marginal habitats of streams and slow-moving backwaters. They also dwell in debris caught in logjams, and some species live under stones and mosses in the streambed.
A few species pupate and hatch in the water, but most migrate to the soil adjoining the water to pupate for one to two weeks. Thus, tying pupal imitations has always struck me as an exercise in futility.
Probably no insect shows a greater difference in appearance than the larval and adult crane fly. Legless, most larvae are fat and often have obscenely bloated bodies. Mature larvae of Tipula abdominalis, the Giant Crane Fly, while reaching 21/2 inches long are almost 1/2 an inch in diameter. In contrast, the adults of T. abdominalis, as with all crane-fly species, have slender bodies “with six long legs, all here and there,” to quote the poet Anon. It’s as though Orson Welles metamorphosed into Tommy Tune.
The adults of most species live only a few days with the length of their lives dependent on environmental conditions. Back in 1920, Charles Paul Alexander, the great student of crane flies, observed in his classic two-volume study, The Crane-Flies of New York, “The presence of moisture is almost a necessity in crane-fly development, and consequently the species as adults occur in the vicinity of water, either running, standing, stagnant, permanent, or temporary.”
Research later confirmed that adults frequent moist habitats to avoid dehydration. For instance, adults in the genus Tipula, which accounts for one-sixth of all the crane flies in the world, including some of the biggest, can lose up to 10 percent of their body weight through water loss in as little as two hours at an air temperature of 68 degrees and a relative humidity of 60 percent. In short, it’s drink or die.
Feeble flyers at the mercy of the slightest breeze, the adults are easily blown on to the surface of a stream or lake. As Alexander wrote, “Fragments of the adult flies are often found in the stomach contents of fish, notably species of trout, most of these pieces being individuals that had fallen into the water or were captured while newly transformed.”
The typical adult female lays 150 to 200 eggs, and if two eggs survive to perpetuate their kind, the other eggs, larvae, and adults that don’t succumb to drought, sudden freezes, or other vagaries of nature, end up as food for fishes, amphibians, insects, birds, and other animals.
In Great Britain, crane flies do get respect from fly fishers who call them “daddy long legs,” the name we use for the long-legged spiderlike phalangids that the Brits call “harvestmen.” In Britain, “fishing the daddy” as a dry fly is standard practice, and there are a number of patterns with names that sound as if they belong in an old Peter Sellers or Terry Thomas comedy, such as Demented Daddy, Drowning Daddy, and Wet Daddy.
Presentations
If there is ever a fly to save for a rainy day, a crane-fly imitation, be it larval or adult, is it. A spate can dislodge the larvae, washing them downstream and exposing them to fish, while many adults are most active during the day after a rain shower. While crane flies are especially effective after heavy rains, larval and adult imitations can produce big results anytime during the spring, summer, and fall.
Larvae. Strong rains and sudden risings in the current level in a stream dislodge larvae both on the banks and in stream detritus. At this time, larval patterns dead-drifted can be very effective. Fish your imitation along streambanks, in the riffles directly below stagnant pools, and along submerged weed beds. Crane-fly larvae are poor swimmers, and trout rarely ignore such vulnerable morsels floating helplessly in the current. Weight your imitations with several turns of lead and use split-shot to keep your fly tumbling along the bottom.
In crane-fly rich environments such as the Clark Fork, Bighorn, Beaverhead, North Platte, and Green, crane-fly larva imitations can be deadly even if there hasn’t been a hard rain. Trout regularly see small numbers of these large, high-protein insects drifting in the current, and at times they can represent a significant portion of a trout’s diet.
Many of the predaceous larvae feed around first light, so the morning hours before any hatching activity can be particularly good times to fish crane-fly larvae. When nothing else seems to be working, a crane-fly larva can turn heads.
Adult. Most crane-fly veterans agree that a big part of the success and fun of fishing crane-fly imitations is the active presentation. I have two basic strategies for fishing crane flies with action. Most of the time, dead-drift adult patterns are not nearly as effective as imitations dapped up and down on the water or skittered across the surface with a down-and-across presentation.
When I know where a trout or bass is hiding next to the bank or in an undercut like a mugger waiting for easy prey, I stay out of sight behind a bush or tree trunk. Holding the rod straight out over the water with my right hand, I release the crane fly from my left hand so that it swings out over the water at the end of the leader. I alternately raise and lower and swing the crane fly so that it flirtatiously flutters 6 to 12 inches above the mugger’s lair, and then I touch it down on the surface and lift it up again to imitate a living, flying crane fly. The strikes, the smashes, can be thunderous. If I don’t get a strike the first time around, I repeat the act two or three times. If nothing happens I move on.
This technique is extremely effective on all water types—from small streams (in which often only the leader is used to present the fly) to lakes, where the British have truly refined this technique to an art, and on larger rivers. But this technique shines on the brushy, close-quartered streams of the East where one secret to this technique’s success is that it allows you to fish water that most people avoid.
An alternative method is to twitch your crane-fly pattern slightly to make a riffle or wake as the pattern enters the fish’s window of vision—or when you think the fly is over a likely lie. Very often the movement will attract a fish’s attention. On stillwaters, twitch your fly so it creates a slight disturbance and then let it sit there. Shaw says, “This is certainly one of the most effective flies that I’ve fished, especially at dusk or in the early morning, but fish will take them all day long in Britain. Here I’ve also used them in Wyoming, and I caught cutthroat trout easily on them. The trout took them very confidently.”
Another deadly presentation for spider dry flies or any other heavily hackled crane-fly adult is the down-and-across presentation. Paul Schmookler, an ardent crane-fly fisherman, says “All the rules of dry-fly fishing are broken when you fish spiders. You never ever fish a spider upstream.” You can feed the dry fly downstream and then twitch it back, dancing it on the water, or cast across stream and down, skittering it on the surface as the belly of the line drags the fly.
Skating heavily hackled patterns across the surface of the water triggers a predatory response in large fish, and the strikes can be breathtaking. This is also a very effective technique for locating fish and then later stalking them with a more precise imitation. Trout seem to have a weakness for patterns fished in this manner.
Patterns
There are many ways to approach fly design for imitating crane flies. With the traditional spider, form indeed follows function, because the long, stiff hackles allow the fly to ride high and skate across the water’s surface. In this age of genetic hackle raised for the teensie-weensie dry-fly market, it is difficult to find the stiff, long hackle required for a spider, a skater, or a variant, but it is available if you’re willing to look.
Other crane-fly patterns are not designed to be skittered across the surface, but rather to sit flush in the surface film like a spent natural and are tied with materials that move in the currents and are lively when twitched. [See Andre Brun’s pattern in this month’s Fly Tier’s Bench. The Editor.]
The distinguishing characteristics of crane-fly adults are the long, thin abdomen; the large, transparent wings; and the wispy legs.
I have tried adult patterns down to a #14, but ordinarily I tie crane flies that imitate the big species, such as T. abdominalis, because I want fish that want a mouthful. Basically, my adult crane-fly imitations are of two kinds. One kind has a hollow-quill stub body,
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