I went bow hunting this weekend, and ended up seeing 6 deer, I tried something different, i nocked an arrrow with a field point on it, i ended up with a few squirrels, i saved all the tails and skinned one out fully and am going to dry the hide. What are some patterns that use squirrel, they are all fox squirrels.
Squirrel tails provide great material for hair wing streamers. Basically, a simple floss or wool body, ribbed, a tail made up of a small tuft of hackle fibres or maraboo, squirrel hair tied on for wing, and a simple hackle at the front works a treat. I tie a lot of these on size 10 2x length hooks. Silver and gold mylar bodies are good too. One thing is that squirrel tail hair is solid, so it doesn’t compress when you tie it in. That makes it a bit prone to come undone if you’re not a bit careful. I find it helps the durability a lot if I put one wrap around the hair only to bind it into a bundle, then tie the bundle on to the shank, trim any waste, and put a decent amount of head cement over the cut ends, let that dry, then hackle and form the head. Takes a bit more time, but I really like squirrel tail patterns so I don’t want them exploding upon my every overly ambitious cast. 
Check out the Fly of the Week archives. I submitted a couple that have squirrel tail wings (Hammlim minnow and Bluenose Squirrel tail).
- Jeff
You threw away the best part. Fried squirrel is very tasty. Check out Dave Whitlock’s fox squirrel nymph for using the body fur. Question: Did you give any thought to the ethics of killing them just for the tails?
Also, if you want to save the body fur for dubbing (it makes GREAT dubbing material) you don’t have to skin the squirrel. You can simply pluck the squirrel by grasping the fur between your thumb and pointer finger and giving it a sharp tug towards the head of the squirrel. It takes me about 10 minutes to strip 90% of the fur off of a squirrel with no messy skinning, scraping and drying. I remove the tail and pluck the fur. The tail gets a bit of 20 MuleTeam Borax on the base of the tail to dry the flesh out. The body fur goes into baggies for dubbing. I always wait until it is nice and cold here in Georgia and I can get enough road kills just from my neighborhood to keep me in dubbing all year around.
Jim Smith
I can’t believe this has been open for almost three hours and I’m the first to list Al Campbel’s SHWAPF (swept hackle, wingless, all purpose fly)
I can’t get the link to work properly but if you go to Fly tying, Beginning tying, part 9 Al tells and shows how it’s done.
Any fly that you use hare’s ear dubbing on you can use squirrel dubbing on for a little different look. It is great, very spiky dubbing.
Joe
I’ve tied a variation of Fran Better’s Usual - but I used Gray Squirrel.
I did eat the squirrel, i boiled it then fried it in flour, it was delicious. what about zonkers, do they work from squirrel good?
Good, it would be a shame to waste them. I have tried zonker strips from untanned rabbit fur and was not happy with them. I haven’t tried squirrel for that reason. The untanned hide tends to shrink whenit dries and results in a one use fly from my point of view.
Squirrel tails make great streamer wings. The Squirrely is one pattern that comes to mind. The dubbing is good. I love the strips to make Slumpbusters. The Lil’ Jo is a tinsel body, with a squirrel wing, and you paint a cool head on it if you want.
Slumpbuster
Lil’ Joe Streamers (from when I hadn’t been tying long. I learned to make the pretty heads from Brimbum aka Big Dale)
To paraphrase rainbowchaser…there’s a difference between untanned and tanned zonker strips…kelkay, I’ll bet yours is tanned.
These crawdad “claws” are squirrel tail. The natural is from an aerial mishap, the orange is store bought.
Yes, I believe they were. I did not do the tanning. I bought them already ready to tie.
Here’s some info for those who like to do it yourself: