just wanted to let everyone know what excellent dryfly, nymph bodies that hares mask whiskers make! they don’t break like a quill does so it makes a quill body dryfly without having to soak the quills in water first :shock:
anyone else know about this ??
What sort of whiskers?
flyandtie,
Can you post a photo of a fly example?
OK I just read it again… hares mask.
Mmmmm…
Wild Rabbit
This is a neat idea. I got caught tweaking the cats whiskers the other day and was given some explicit advice from my daughter. I never thought of rabbit though. I’d love to see a pic too, so fire up flyandtie!
I too have used these. They are quite stiff and i found a little slick with the thread. But none the less very nice stuff.
It is an old idea, but a good one. One point though, a lot of people are confusing the Rabbit with Hare.
A little instruction :-
The European Rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) is a small, grey-brown mammal ranging from 34-45 cm (13-18 inches) in length,
and is approximately 1.3-2.2 kg (3-5 lb) in weight.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c … inchen.jpg
The European Hare or Brown Hare (Lepus europaeus) is a species of hare native to northern, central, and western Europe and western Asia.
It is a mammal adapted to temperate open country. It is related to the similarly appearing rabbit,
which is in the same family but a different genus. It breeds on the ground rather than in a burrow and relies on speed to escape.
It is larger, longer-eared, and longer-legged than a rabbit. It has a body size of 50-70 (19.685 to 27.559 in.) cm and a tail length of 7-11 cm.
The weight for a full-grown adult ranges from 2.5 to 6.5 kg (5.156 to 14.33 lbs). It can run at speeds of up to 70 km/h (45 mi/h).
It is strictly herbivorous. It eats grasses and herbs during the summer months but changes to feeding on twigs,
bark, and the buds of young trees in winter, making it a pest to orchard farmers.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c … ldhase.jpg
This is a running hare, hence the expression ‘hared off’'.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e … g_hare.jpg
The two animals may appear the same but they are definitely not, over here when a pattern says ‘hare’,
it means ‘hare’ and when it says ‘rabbit’ it means ‘rabbit’.
There are hares masks for sale and there are, less commonly rabbit masks.
Hollywood and Bugs Bunny have a lot to answer for.
I feel much better now.
Donald,
I fell into your trap! I knew it was a HARE, but I didn’t think Gringo knew, so I said Rabbit to explain what we were talking about.
Also, I don’t think Buggs Bunny was very nice to Elmer Fudd!!! 
I don’t want to ‘HARE’ any more about it! 
D’oh!
Are the whiskers that different?
Donald, I am very glad that you feel better. I have always thought that Bugs Bunny looked more like a hare than a rabbit, not to split hares, or anything.
In general Hollywood has a lot worse to answer for than that. When I look at series from the BBC like “Last of the Summer Wine”, “As Time Goes By” or “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” with the late Jeremy Brett, I can’t help but wonder why can’t Hollywood produce something like that.
Now I feel better…
regards,
Ed
hey guys sorry but i cannot take a picture of the whisker dry flies because the camera i have does not have a macro mode so all pictures of flies look like a ball of fuzz
sorry!
I have in the past taken pictures of flies using a flatbed scanner. Using books to lift the lid high enough,
and the scan on high resolution, it is possible to get passible results.
I thought I’de give it a try -
This is a bit of a Variant of Art Flick’s Variant, I tied it as an experiment a few
months ago, using Furnace hackle & tail but a cream hackle stalk, but I did not
soak the stalk in water before use, so the results could have been better.
The point was to show that a flat bed scanner can give reasonable results,
it was an HP Scanjet 2100C. It is about 6 years old.
I used whiskers from a hare’s mask in a limited materials swap here on FAOL a while back. Hare’s mask was one of the very very few materials we were allowed to use…the whiskers make pretty good nymph tails (you can get several flies from a pair of whiskers).
A picture of one of those flies can be seen at: http://thwack.smugmug.com/photos/59329514-L.jpg
Thanks!
