I tried to tie up some Baillie’s Black Spiders yesterday, and was frustrated to not be able to find the feathers I thought I needed. The recipe calls for the “long, lance-shaped” feathers and to make 3-5 wraps or wind the feathers around the thread. Trouble was, I couldn’t find any feathers that had the blackish part long enough to make that many winds. Does Starling come in varying grades? Or ages? Do I just need to go to a shop and pick through them till I find one with longer feathers?
I get good reports back from customers who use Natural Black JV hen in place of starling.
I almost always have a good supply of Black JVs in stock. User friendly stems (like their big brothers)
Softer barbs that work better in the water when fished. every feather on a skin (I sell only both cape &
saddle from one young hen) making them very cost effective.
There are a lot of uses for the Black JV hen.
Denny
Thanks, Denny, when I get to a spot where I can get mail, I’ll get in touch with you - have gotten those JV hens before - they are sure pretty. Guess I could try a Brown Spider with the hen I do have?
I’ve not come across the Baillie Spider before, but a quick search on Google shows it to be the same as the Stewart Black Spider. Quite honestly I’ve yet to find a starling feather long enough in the barb for the hook that you are tying on that isn’t long enough to tie the fly.
Are you tying the feather in by its tip? Thats the way it should be done. I find the easiest way to get hold of the tip is to pinch it in some small English style hackle pliers, then stroke the free fibres back. Keeping it in the pliers makes tying it in easier.
Being one of the old North Country Flies (it goes back at least 300 years) it is a sparse fly. Even with three to five wraps of hackle it will not have a bushy hackle.
The easy way to show you is in a few photos.
Prep your hackle, and start your thread. Take the thread about 1/3 of the length you want the body.
Tie in the hackle as you continue to tie the body.
Finish the body and twist the hackle around the thread.
Wind the hackle and thread together to the head. Split the hackle and thread. Trim out the excess hackle, and whip finish.
Repeat a couple of dozen times.
In the example I’ve used a size 12 wet fly hook. This is a bit on the large size for this fly. Normally I’d use size 16 to 20.
Hope that helps.
A.
3 grades - Nuisance, Pest and Vermin. If I had the inclination, and a good supply of rubber gloves to keep all the nasty critters that infest them off, I’d cull out the flock that overwhelms my bird feeder and terrorizes the local songbirds and send you the skins. Go with the black hen suggestion.
Regards,
Scott
The Baillie’s Black Spider and Stewart’s Black Spider are the same fly, the patten was given to Stewart by Baillie, as he acknowledged in his book. He never called it ‘Stewart’s’ spider himself. This was done by others.
I tie the Starling Hackle in by the Butt’ concave up, pointing over the eye. I then run the well waxed silk down the hook to where I want to stop the body. I then run the silk to about half or a third of the way from the eye. I then palmer the hackle down to the silk. I tie in the hackle with the silk, and the run the silk back up through the palmered hackle, to the eye where it is tied down.
Of course the spare bit of hackle is trimmed off.
Same sequence for Black hen. I use #14 and smaller hooks. The reason Brown silk was used is because black silk had to be left longer in the very acidic dyeing solution, this made black silk very liable to snapping. thus well waxed brown. The Red and Dun Spiders are dressed the same way. There ye are, a wee bit o’ fly fishing history.
That was my way, here is Davie MacPhail’s plus anothe wet fly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV7k3epJfJY
Donald, I think I could watch Davie tie all day! The second fly he ties in that video is pretty greqt. Simple and effective!
He is a great fly dresser QK.
Two excellent flies, although I tend to only semi-palmer the hackle and show a bit of the waxed brown body at the butt end.
The second fly is a wee beauty and very simple.
Donald -
Thanks for the link. Neat way to start the day.
John
P.S. AlanB - thanks for the demo on how you tie the starling. I don’t use it much, but will keep your technique in mind when I do.
Will try that way, Alan, the instructions I was looking at were to tie it in at the butt, so maybe this will work better. Donald, that is the way I did mine, and I think they look OK, will see what the fish think.
Well said!
I don’t shoot my starling. not worth it when perfectly good clean skins can be bought so cheaply. The starling has many excellent hackles for all sorts of wet and dry flies. I don’t think their personal habits have anything to do with their fly-dresing usefulness.
Hi,
I agree Donald. The starling is under-rated by many in terms of it’s fly quality, but it’s one of my favorite feathers for small dark spiders. The black spider is a great pattern, and I use starling on Pritt’s water cricket as well.
- Jeff
[b]I am glad somebody agrees with me about Starling. Thanks Jeff.
Here is G. E. M. Skues opinion:-
[/b]**Starling. - This bird is the fly dresser’s stand-by, and if he had only one bird to rely on all the year round he would chose the starling without hesitation. The birds usefulness begins early in life. When his plumes are just out, and he is leaving the nest, he is a delicate dull brown dun in hue, and then his wing feathers, primary and secondary, afford lovely pale wings for flies of all sorts. As he grows older the colour of the wings darkens, and in an old bird the fibres become very dark indeed. The wings are often dyed in onion and other olive dyes.
A large range of colour is thus obtained. The hackles from underneath the wing, both of young bird and old, are used as substitutes for the dotterel hackle, though not considered equal to it. There are numerous feathers about the body and wings tipped with yellow which make beautiful glossy green black hackles, and in the cock bird the neck hackles have a purple black metallic hue at the back of the neck, and a greenish metallic hue under the throat, and are long and shapely. The short side of the secondaries of this bird is used in Scotland to dress the well-known Tweedside pattern, the White Tip, so called because of the pale yellowish tip to each wing. The tail, with a soft brownish edge, wings the female Black Gnat. The quills of the primaries and secondaries stripped off make good bodies, dyed or undyed.
Don,
I understand that in Scotland, starlings are a native species, but in the U.S. they are an invasive species. In many states they are classed as depredators “of orimentals or shade trees, agricultural crops, livestock, wildlife, or when concentrated in such numbers as to cause a health hazard,” and therefore starlings are killed in large numbers.
By the way, they skin-out very easily… and they do have some nice useful feathers.
Until a few years ago (twenty +?), starlings were regarded as a first class nuisance by many local authorities in the UK. They moved to city centres in the winter, as it was warmer than out in the rural areas. They roosted in thousands on any large building or structure like a a bridge and caused massive pollution and corrosion. So maybe the problem with starlings is their ability to adapt to modern human society?
Donald:
They rank right up there with Great (Boat-tailed) Grackles, a native here in my area in coastal Texas, with respect to their winter roosting flocks, and habits. Their droppings not only kill the leaves on the evergreen trees they roost in, but they will eat the paint off of a car if they are not routinely washed off. They also roost on electric distribution lines; being so dense another cannot alight on them, and seem to prefer the overhead wires at well lighted intersections around major shopping areas. This extra weight on the wires causes excess ‘sag’, which has a tendency to stress the wires to the extent that they often have to be replaced ‘prematurely’. Fortunately, the starlings, unlike the grackles, are not protected by law.
Clearly, both are highly adaptable.
Frank
[b]Donald, in bad years our over-wintering flocks can reach millions (thousands of thousands) of individuals. I have literally seen flocks which looked like black rivers stretching across the sky as far as could be seen in either direction. Since their numbers were so overwhelming, the State of Tennessee instituted a campaign to reduce their numbers. On nights in which a rapid freeze was expected, airplanes would spray the roosts with a detergent solution to wash off the birds protective oils. In the mornings, the grounds under the roosts would be covered in dead birds. I have not seen those vast flocks for years.
Regards,
Ed
P.S. I set aside those quail skins and forgot about them. I’ll try to get them in the mail this week. [/b]
I’ve seen that a couple times, when I was a teen. They were roosting in a small forested area just south of the housing addition I lived in. Haven’t seen one since.