I mentioned last week that I brought back some deer and squirrel hair from animals I bagged 16 or 17 years ago. I tried tying some flies with them tonight.

I tied five streamers with squirrel tail and varies bodies and throats, all on size 12 barbless streamer hooks:

• Bodies
  • Brass wire, full length of the shank
  • Red thread + silver tinsel rib
• Throats
  • Partridge
  • Deer hair
  • Hen pheasant soft hackle barbs
  • Grizzly hackle

Then I tied two deer hair flies, a sedge and an emerger with a tail. Both used some greyish brown yarn for the body instead of hare dubbing. Both were on size 14 barbless hooks.

Overall good experimentation, even if I only tied seven flies. What I learned:

• Hair is harder to work with than feathers. Messier, too.
• Order of tying matters. The throat has to come after the wings or else the wings will pull the throat material up in while you are wrapping. In general, I think the bigger material has to go first.
• I like the look of ribbing and should do more of it.
• Wool yarn is a pretty good substitute for dubbing.
• I like the look of all three feather throats I tied, but tying barbs instead of full feathers worked better and had nicer proportions.
• Waiting for super glue to dry is annoying, but accelerant smells. I’ll buy some UV cure glue.

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What’s next?

• I ordered some dubbing so I can learn how to do that.
• I need some dubbing wax, but I think it might be fun to make my own since I already make spoon finishing wax. I need to go out in the woods and collect some pine resin and cook it down to rosin to blend in. This will make it tacky.
• More soft hackle and dry hackle flies. Perhaps some of Tom from Teton Tenkara‘s patterns.
• Some bead head nymphs for the winter. Probably some using pheasant tail barbs.
• A bunch of color combinations of Ishigaki Kebari and killer bugs in sizes 14 and 16.