Halloween a favourite time for this fly tier

For many anglers fly tying is a big part of their sport. It helps pass time in the off season and it also allows you to experiment with different fly patterns. Another advantage is cost. When you can tie a fly for the cost of a hook and a few cents worth of materials you don’t mind losing them to trees, rocks and logs. While there are some specialized material that you can only purchase at your local fly tying store there is also a multitude of materials available to you from other sources. This time of year is a great time to pick up fly tying materials because of two events, Halloween and hunting season. Halloween is a good time to pick up some unusual fly tying materials from the wide assortment of materials that is available for trick or treaters. Over the years I’ve bought everything from hair extensions in every colour imaginable, to tinsel, feathers and foam.

If you hunt, or have friends that do, then you have a wide variety of material available to you. Deer body hair is the main ingredient is some of the most popular flies from muddler minnows for trout to bugs and bombers for salmon. Many streamers and bucktails, as the name implies, use hair from the tail. Moose and caribou body hair are also used and I find caribou to be the best material to use when tying bombers. Rabbit skin, dyed or natural, makes great material for nymphs and leech patterns. Preserving this material is fairly simple, salt and borax do the trick for me. I scrape the skin as clean as possible and then rub in both salt and borax. Partridge and duck feathers are also the key ingredient in many flies. Using these materials also ensures we make the maximum use of the game we harvest.

Road kill is another possible source for found materials. Although my wife cured me of this habit some years ago I still know anglers who can’t pass a dead raccoon or squirrel on the road without stopping and throwing it in the trunk. While this can provide you with a lifetime of fly tying material, as well as a smelly trunk, it can also get you charged by an enforcement officer. Unless you have a trapping licence, and the season is open, you cannot be in possession of furbearers. This also applies to game such as partridge and pheasant. The season would have to be open, and you would have to have a small game hunting licence. The exception is for squirrels. There is no closed season on them so you can pick them up, when it is safe to do so. To prevent any bugs from invading your fly tying materials it is a good idea to store any hair and feathers that you collect in the freezer for a while to kill any bugs or insect eggs that may be on them.

While I have never tied them myself I have seen some offbeat flies that have been tied with some unusual materials. A birch bark fly was tied commercially some years ago. The oil in the bark served as a natural fly floatant and it apparently caught trout. I am sure that if you experiment you could probably tie a fly from almost anything.