Fountains of Youth – Classic trout flies that have withstood the test of time … flies that remain “forever young”

by Rusty Dunn

When a Boeing 777 takes flight, it carries 3 million parts on the journey. When your artificial fly takes flight, you can count its parts on your ten fingers. Hook, tail, body, wing, hackle, etc. are the replaceable parts of a fly. They are the Lego building blocks of fly design and can be mixed and matched in a bewildering number of com­binations. Change the wing material? That’s a new fly. Change the tail? Another fly. Substitute a different dubbing? Yet another fly. Tinkering with old flies to create (and rename!) new ones is never-ending. Tomorrow’s hot new fly will almost certainly be a reshuffled version of materials in today’s flies, which are in turn reshuffled versions of yesterday’s flies, which are in turn … you get the picture. Entirely new fly designs arise occasionally but, for the most part, the artificial flies of one era are recombined and tweaked versions of those from an earlier era. Popularity of flies, however, is a fickle friend, and few flies are in wide­spread use by anglers for more than a decade or two.

Fur and feather have long been the principle ingredi­ents of fly tying, but their popularity rises and falls also. When use of a certain fly declines, so does use of its key ingredients. Examine the contents of the bins in a fly shop and try to find flies tied with goatsucker wings, hog’s wool, throstle feathers, or seal’s fur. You’ll come up empty, because those materials enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame long ago. The materials faded away when their flies disappeared from use. What about today’s tying materials? Some are flash-in-the-pan newcomers, but many have been in use for decades or, in some cases, centuries. Such materials are winners of fly fishing’s never-ending com­petition for minutes, hours, and days of time knot­ted to your tippet.

Which of today’s tying materials have persisted for the longest period of time? The list is fairly long, but pea-­
cock herl would be at or near the top. Examples of modern flies that feature peacock herl include the Prince Nymph, Royal Wulff, Pheasant Tail, Griffith’s Gnat, Foam Beetle, Copper John, and others. Certain of these flies are relative newcomers, but they are descended from ancestors (and ancestors of ances­tors) that also featured peacock herl. Feathers of the European starling would also be very high on the list of classic materials that are still in widespread use today. In the words of G.E.M. Skues, “[Starling] is the fly dresser’s standby, and if he had to have one bird only to rely on all the year round he would choose the star­ling without hesitation.”

Both peacock herl and starling feathers date to the very begin­nings of fly fishing history. The English-language liter­ature of fly fishing began in 1496 with A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle by Juliana Berners, who described recipes of twelve artificial flies. Two of those twelve (the Shell Flye and Blacke Louper) were “lappyd abowte (ribbed) with the herle of ye pecok tayle“. 150 years later, Thomas Barker described the first fly hav­ing a body of peacock herl in The Art of Angling (1651). Thomas Chetham later introduced starling (and many other still-popular game birds) to our cabinet of materi­als (The Angler’s Vade Medum, 1681). Fly evolution (or, at least, recorded evolution) moved slowly in those early days, and two centuries elapsed before John Jackson of North Yorkshire affixed a collar of starling hackle to a body of peacock herl, thus yielding his Brown Clock fly (The Practical Fly-Fisher, 1854). “Clock” is a colloquial term in the English North for bee­tle, and Jackson’s fly imitates aquatic beetles. In keep­ing with history’s tradition of “tweak and rename” flies, Jack­son’s recipe is but a minor vari­ation (starling instead of sparrow) of an earlier fly (John Younger, On River Angling for Salmon and Trout, 1840). Similarly, today’s Starling and Herl (Sylvester Nemes, The Soft-Hackled Fly, 1975) is but a minor variation (yellow instead of brown thread) of Jackson’s Brown Clock.

Copyright 2019, Rusty Dunn

Brown Clock

Today’s Starling & Herl is tied most often with red or black thread. Jackson’s original pattern was de­signed to imitate aquatic beetles, but its dark body and col­lar of soft hackle make the fly very effective when fished dead-drift during grannom hatches (late April in the Driftless).