From the Gallatin River, Aug 8, 2010
I took these photos yesterday.
Real-deal models to tie from seemed like a good idea.
I'm ever-so-slowly getting this project revved up. Eventually I'd
like to have a good, sharp-focus closeup photo for every critter I try
to imitate at the vise.

Yesterday:
I couldn't get my camera to work in aperture priority mode for some reason.
So I shot these photos in auto-mode, which ended up shooting at F-5.6,
which doesn't give much depth of field.
So I'll redo this again soon. Before the month is out for sure.

I netted these nymphs by myself, working alone with a 4' x 4' net nailed to two sticks,
and by shuffling my feet. I shot the actual photos streamside with available light
on an old blue-green-colored dinner plate, using an extension ring behind a 105mm macro lense.
I tossed the bugs back into the river after shooting.

One thing struck me almost right away. The Gallatin is a fast-moving freestone stream.
There are lots of nymphs. But the ratio of this species to that is strongly in favor of stonefly nymphs
sculpins and net-spinning caddis. The mayflies are all further downstream where the current slows down
and where more algae and aquatic plants grow. From Gallatin Gateway on upstream, you're talking
stonefly nymphs and sculpins. The only book I have that really talks about species counts (from both
netting counts and stomach contents counts) is Trout Streams, by Paul Needham, based on work
Needham did at Oregon State University in the late 1930s. What I saw today--what Needham
realized almost a century ago--suddenly seems like a crystal-clear no-brainer: if you want to know something useful
about the local salmonids, you might want to start by documenting the food resource. Which varies considerably,
from this stretch of the river to that.

And if you're fishing the Gallatin above Gateway, mayfly imitations are probably not the best choice. Sure. There are some. Quite a few in fact. But not numerically. Not as a percentage of the available food resource.

Here's a Hydropsychidae net spinning caddis worm. Shot and released this morning.
AKA the 'green rock worm.'


...and an extra-big, 1-1/4" long Golden Stonefly nymph of some kind. I'll work with bugguide.net
to get a real species identification on this one. Those guys are fun to work with.
OK, from bugguide.net: "This is Claassenia sabulosa (Banks), a very common perlid stonefly found throughout the Rockies, up into Canada and can even be found here in California"



A few more 2010 Montana Bug pics