The Bigger They Are The Ardea They Fall                                Dries         Wets         Nymphs      Spiders

I’m not too surprised when someone shoves a brown envelope into my hands with furtive glances.  Well unless it contains a large amount of used twenties and a whispered warning to make yourself scarce before Mr Big catches up with you.

Therefore when, at one of our recent Sussex Thursday tying evenings at Patcham, the chairman of the main guild, Alan Middleton, thrust a brown envelope into my paws I thought it might be a pay off from the main guild to stop writing these articles.

However looking at the scrawl on the front - Ardea cinerea - it was clear that a few Grey Heron feathers wouldn’t buy many personal desert islands.  Alan indicated I should cast these treasurers widely so I passed them on to whoever fancied them as I didn’t need any for myself as I still largely had most of a complete set of wings from a dead Heron I found whilst out walking last March.

It occurred to me that only a few people decided to have some, and I wondered whether this was down to the fact that heron, specifically herl from the primary and secondary feathers (the main flight feathers of the wing) is hardly used in trout flies these days.  Now this is obviously linked to supply and demand – with Heron being a protected species the material doesn’t appear in catalogues for sale and it is only those available to those who make use of any dead bird or discarded feather found on their countryside outings.

It set me thinking that maybe it might be worth tying up a few of these old patterns (and as I surprisingly discovered some quite new patterns).  I dusted off my memory banks, had a rifle through my fly boxes and came up with the following patterns, rather sadly probably only one of the older ones and one of the new ones are still used regularly and familiar to most fishermen today – I’ll leave you to decide which ones they are!

Before falling into the detail of the patterns I should mention that any of the long wing feathers or even the tail feathers from a heron yield very usable herl and it should be cut off and used very much like pheasant tail fibres.  However heron herl is more fragile than pheasant and I apply the following tactic when making a herl body as it makes it slightly easier to tie and also more resistant to fish teeth and gives a nicer segmented abdomen effect than herl alone:

When laying down the under body of thread do not clip of the waste thread but keep it attached.  Then when the heron herl is tied-in take this trailing piece of thread and wrap it around the herl.  Grasping both the herl and the thread wrap the body as normal and then tie both the herl and thread at the thorax point.

NB Some of the winged flies have suffered in the transportation to the photographers and these wings have separated and are not as sharp as when tied – this is OK though as these flies now look more like they would do when fished with.

Paul Davis     November 2009