Tying deer and squirrel hair flies

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.

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.