moucheur2003

Bleached Australian opossum is very close. I have some that varies from cream to rusty tan. Within that range is a tone that matches red fox squirrel belly very well.

The colors are right for a red fox squirrel, but the fur looks longer than typical for a squirrel. It's hard to tell from the photo without a sense of scale. If the back guard hairs are long enough to tie a wing on a #6 or 8 wet fly, I'd say it's a woodchuck (aka groundhog), but if the fur isn't useful for much other than spiky dubbing, it's probably a fox squirrel.

In the old days they would use slips from a turkey tail feather or wood duck flank or teal flank (depending on the color/pattern you want), coated with a flexible adhesive like Dave's Flexament or a spray fixative like Krylon.

The Whiting website has a good discussion of "variants": http://www.whitingfarms.com/articles/variant.html

Cree is rare because cree coloring results from an unstable hybrid cross of the Plymouth Rock (grizzly) and Rhode Island Red (brown) breeds. You can't breed pure cree birds to one another and get all pure cree offspring, the way you can with stable breeds. The hybrid offspring have all kinds of variations in their coloring, but relatively few show the consistent "cree" feathers throughout the cape and/or saddle. If they were dogs we'd call them mongrels. More often there are some barred feathers, some solid brown feathers, some splotchy feathers, and some furnace feathers all in the same cape or saddle, and the barred feathers do not necessarily have the even proportions of black, brown and white of a good cree. These unevenly colored capes are what is called "variant". True cree capes and saddles are expensive only because of their relative scarcity, not because cree feathers are inherently superior to other colors. However, you can often find variant capes or saddles with a decent quantity of cree or near-cree feathers on them for very reasonable prices, because a lot more of them than true cree are produced when the two breeds are crossed, and there is lower demand for capes and saddles that are not a single consistent color.

Beautiful! But wow, that's a lot of work. (And he forgot the rubber legs!)

Squirrel tail hair is useful for wet fly and streamer wings but not dubbing. You just clip a clump off the tail when you need it. Squirrel body fur makes good dubbing. Skin the squirrel, then and dry or tan the hide and store it. (I just buy a prepared hide when I need one; they're pretty cheap and it's not nearly as messy.) When you need dubbing, trim fur from the hide as closely as you can with scissors or an electric shaver, then blend it in your fingers if it's a relatively small amount. If you're doing a big batch all at once you can blend it in water the way josephcsylvia suggests up above instead. I usually trim it in batches and store it in a zip-loc, but you could also just keep it on the skin and trim what you need one fly at a time.

Thanks everyone for the replies. On my last trip to Jo-Ann's I found this stuff, which also looks pretty useful for making flashy bodies. I think I will be able to stay busy this winter. http://www.joann.com/dmc-metallic-embroidery-floss-87yds/prd2579.html

Beautiful work, Kimo! What size/model are the hooks you use for the thorax?

Thanks PT! With only slight tweaks that looks like it could also do double duty for some of the major mayfly nymphs here in the east.

Still a lot neater than mine!

Last season I had some success trying out some tinsel-bodied nymphs, a style I hadn't fished before. The ones I tried were a #14 Lightning Bug tied with silver holographic tinsel and a peacock thorax, and a #18 Rainbow Warrior variant tied with greenish-goldish pearl tinsel over a fluorescent orange thread base (which shone through the tinsel under UV light) in lieu of the standard red. My success with those two patterns pricked my curiosity. A little surfing the internet reveals that there seem to be a lot of color variants of both patterns mentioned, but relatively few recipes given for them. Tonight I tried tying a Copper John with holographic copper braid instead of the standard copper wire. Who else has had good luck with tinsel-bodied nymphs? What patterns and sizes, and under what conditions?

Ayup.

Thanks to all for the suggetions. I tried putting the bead in my left palm as Dubs does, and holding the hook in an electrical clip as shown in the Tightlines video that Fin-ite shared, and that seems to work pretty well for me. I was 4 for 4 tonight with no lost beads.

So last night I was trying to tie up some beadhead nymphs using 5/64" beads on #18 curved scud hooks, and my big fingers simply could not manage the tiny beads and hooks. I dropped 3 beads on the floor before I finally managed to thread the 4th one onto the hook. Is there a simple, easy method for putting small beads on small hooks?