Ep 84: The Entomology of Fly Fishing, with Rick Hafele
Rick Hafele is an entomologist and avid fly fisherman. While Rick worked professionally in entomology for many years, he also enjoys applying his knowledge of bugs to his love of fishing. In this episode, we talk about entomology as it relates to trout, how fishes’ feeding behavior depends on what food sources are available, and some of the major groups of insects that are vital to a trout’s diet.
Website: rickhafele.com
Instagram: @rickhafele
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Katie
You're listening to the Fish Untamed Podcast, your home for fly fishing in the backcountry. This is episode 84 with Rick Hafele on the entomology of fly fishing. all right I just love to start by getting a background on all my guests so I did read your bio online but I'd love to get kind of a like how'd you get here how'd you get into fly fishing and where have you moved along the way to get to where you're at now?
Rick
Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Well, I grew up in Illinois in a little farm town, a town called Piatone, which is pretty much nobody's heard of. But it was halfway between Kankakee and Joliet. So if you've watched the Blues Brothers, you know where Joliet is. Joliet Jake and all that good stuff. It's in the flatland of Illinois with corn and soybeans everywhere. Kind of a great place to grow up as a kid. It's a small town, a lot of freedom to play around, which is, I think, helpful in my developing interest in fishing as a kid. It was the kind of place where you could ride your bike out to a little stream or a little bluegill pond and do whatever you wanted to do to try and catch fish any way you could. So I had a lot of freedom, a lot of fun growing up there. I actually got started fly fishing at a fairly early age, probably around 11 years old. An uncle who lived in Missouri, we'd occasionally go to vacation down there. He was a fishing kind of crazed kind of guy and fished with every kind of gear you could think of, including fly fishing. So he put a fly rod in my hand and basically said, you know, you won't catch any fish unless the fly is in the water. Because my fly was up in the trees a lot, of course. But he was one who kind of gave me that very first start. And for whatever reason, it took. And I guess growing up as a kid, I was always one of those kind of guys running around looking at bugs and sticking them in jars. And we had little creeks around that we'd go to and had a lot of fun. So it was just a combination of having a chance to play outside in an environment that was like that. And one of the one of the cool things that really got me interested in entomology at a young age, when I was a teenager, I guess, was we had a lot of lightning bugs in Illinois. And if you've grown up out there, you know what that's like. And they're pretty cool. But one of the crazy things we did as kids is we had certain cars that you could put on a railroad track. And there were little railroads around that only ran a couple of trains a day. And at night, when we were teenagers, we'd go put a car on the rails. And you'd let like half the air out of the tires. And the car would just go down the railroad tracks. And you'd put it in drive. And you wouldn't steer or anything. You'd be sitting on the hood. You wouldn't even be in the car. And you'd go down through the cornfields out in the country in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. And there were places where there were just millions of lightning bugs. I mean, it was there were so many you probably could have read a book. It was pretty spectacular.
Katie
I've never heard of this train track riding thing.
Rick
Riding the rails. You know, I don't think you could get away with it nowadays.
Katie
It sounds sketchy, but did you ever get yourselves into a pickle doing that or did it always work out?
Rick
You know, fortunately, it always worked out. You'd put your car on the rails at a little rail crossing out in the country on a gravel road. And you knew that, you know, 10 miles down, there was another crossing where you'd take your car off. And you had to have a car just the perfect width that would fit on top of the rails. I have to say, so this is in the 60s, like around 1966. So long time, long time ago. It was pretty crazy. And it was one of the goofy things you do out in the country as a kid, I guess. But it ended up being quite an interesting entomological experience with the lightning bugs.
Katie
I have to say, I like that you call them lightning bugs. I feel like there's lightning bug people and firefly people, and I grew up a lightning bug person, so I'm happy to hear another one.
Rick
They've always been lightning bugs where I grew up.
Katie
So did your love of entomology spring up separately from fly fishing, and then they kind of started to feed off each other? Did they kind of grow into you together?
Rick
You know, I think it was a lot of it growing together. I think it was being out on water fishing that sort of introduced the idea that there are bugs in the lakes and streams and exposed me to that idea. I was fishing a little farm pond once in the evening, right at near dusk, and there was a hatch of hexagenea. And I had no clue what they were, the big mayfly. And it was like there were thousands that just came off all at once. And it was like the whole surface of the lake just went up into the sky. And I was dumbfounded. I was like, you have got to be kidding. What is going on here? And so I had some experiences like that that just really I thought were amazing. And there was a TV show on at that time that really got me enthused about fly fishing. And I've talked to some other people my age who watched it. But if you're at all younger, you wouldn't have heard of it probably. It was called Gad About Gaddis. And this guy was the flying fisherman. It was the way it was presented on TV. And it was on Sunday afternoon after we'd get home from church. And I would never want to miss this show. It's a gad about Gaddis, the flying fisherman. And he'd go fly fishing all over the country. He'd fly fish for striped bass on the East Coast. He'd be fly fishing for cutthroat trout on the Platte River in Colorado. And it was just this cool show. And so that kind of got me really excited about going back out West and seeing some of the rivers in the West. We never traveled as a kid. We never did vacations into the Rockies or west of the Rockies. So I was a real naive kid when it came to what it was like out here. But it got me excited about it. And when I got time, graduated from high school, I wanted to get into biology, fisheries biology. And so I went to school, undergraduate school in Bellingham, which was a great, great place to go. Very different than Illinois.
Katie
And so that's what brought you out west?
Rick
Yes. Yeah. Brought me out west was to go to college and went to Bellingham. And I was, you know, very much into fly fishing at that point already. So there were just all kinds of streams and steelhead fishing and salmon fishing and a lot of trout fishing to explore around the North Cascades near Bellingham. So it was pretty awesome.
Katie
And now, did you get your degree in fisheries biology or did you switch and get it in entomology with like a minor in fisheries?
Rick
Yeah. So my undergraduate degree at Bellingham was just in general biology. OK. And and then it was pretty interesting. So my senior year, the head of the biology department had gotten his Ph.D. studying stoneflies at Oregon State University. And when I was a senior, he offered an aquatic entomology class, which I was really excited about. And I had already taken general entomology from this guy at that point. But I was the only student that signed up for it, this aquatic entomology class. And he went ahead and taught it. So I just got together with this, Jerry Craft was his name, and just a great professor. And we'd get together in his office every week and talk about aquatic insects. It was pretty neat. And so he really helped kind of mentor me and kind of focusing on how to get into grad school at Oregon State. And that's where I decided to focus on aquatic entomology, aquatic insects. I worked part time in Bellingham during the summer or full time during the summer, summer jobs for the fisheries department. And so I got a good taste of kind of some fisheries biology work and kind of decided I'd probably get bored with fisheries biology in a 30 plus year career. And I knew that insects, you could never figure it all out. And there's way too many of them to ever understand everything. So I decided to go in the direction of insects instead of fish.
Katie
That's kind of funny. I think most people would assume they'd go the other way. They'd say, you know, I can never get enough of fish, but bugs, you know, I can only pay attention so long before I just zone out. But it's fun that you kind of went the other direction. And we're like, the possibilities are endless in the insect world.
Rick
Exactly. You know, out west, a healthy stream in the west might have 10 fish species in it total. Where if you are a fish biologist in the Midwest or East Coast, they might have 200 species of fish. So in terms of just the ecology and the diversity, everything's focused on salmon, trout, and steelhead in the West. I mean, if you're a fish biologist, that's what you end up doing 99% of the time, which is great. You know, that's cool. But I just love the diversity of insects. I mean, it was just so fascinating.
Katie
And what have you done since then? Like, what has your job entailed as an entomologist?
Rick
Yeah. So right out of grad school, I got connected with a consulting company that was doing permitting for big companies, mostly mining companies that would have to get permits to develop a mine. And that involved a lot of stream assessment work. And so I got it was a great job. I worked up in Alaska, flying into wilderness areas and collecting aquatic insects and doing water quality, water chemistry kind of sampling. A lot of fisheries work, too. I did a lot of helicopter spawning surveys from helicopters. It was it was just a pretty interesting job to kind of fall into right out of grad school. And then in the recession in the early 80s, that company went out of business. And so I was laid off. And that's when I got my job with the Department of Environmental Quality, the state in Oregon state agency. And I was one of the lead people there developing the whole bioassessment program for water quality assessments. And I landed again at a really good time when EPA was starting to really fund a lot of state, trying to fund state programs and more biological assessment rather than just chemical assessment for pollution studies. So there was a lot of interest in developing that type of work. And that's what I did a lot of at DEQ, was develop the methods, sampling methods, the analysis techniques and stuff for using aquatic insects, aquatic invertebrates, not just insects, but snails, worms, all of the invertebrates to evaluate water pollution problems. And that's what most of my career was focused on.
Katie
So does that just involve looking at, you know, different species that indicate good water quality? Is it just number of species? Or do you take into account, you know, these species generally indicate good water quality and, you know, these are desirable species to have present in a watershed? Like what goes into a biological assessment like that?
Rick
Yeah, you're looking at the overall community structure of the invertebrates. So there's quite a bit known about which species are sensitive to different kinds of pollutants. Some like heavy metals, mayflies are extremely sensitive to heavy metals. Others might be sensitive to herbicides. And in general, the kinds of insects we focus on for fly fishing, you know, the big three, mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies, they tend to fall into some of the more sensitive species. They're called the EPT, which is the ephemeroptera, plecoptera and tricoptera. So they're always looked at as kind of the indicators of a healthy stream, if you have a lot of VPT out there. And then as things get more stressed, either from warmer temperature, pollutants from nutrients or metals from mining, you see those numbers of species decline in abundance. And you see species that are tolerant increase in abundance. And so you're looking at the ratio of those different sensitive to tolerant species.
Katie
EPTs take me back to undergrad. I remember that from a stream ecology class I took. And that's something that has cemented itself in my mind. I think I heard it enough times that EPTs takes me right back.
Rick
Where did you take that class?
Katie
Allegheny College in northwestern Pennsylvania.
Rick
Yeah. Okay. A lot of work's been done back there in Pennsylvania on stream ecology. It's a big topic back there.
Katie
Yeah. When I was there, they were doing brook trout streams and trying to survey which of these tiny streams that were generally flowing through someone's private land, surveying those streams to see whether brook trout were present because that was the species of choice for that area. But that was a lot of fun, electrofishing and all those things. So that's definitely where I got my first taste of entomology, although I didn't pursue it like you did, but I did enjoy that class a lot.
Rick
Oh, yeah, that sounds awesome.
Katie
So how has entomology kind of, because it sounds like your job was not necessarily directly focused on fishing quality or anything like that with rivers, but I'm sure that you've taken a lot from your work with entomology and applied it to your own life. So kind of more on the fishing side, how have you found a way to kind of incorporate that and use it to your advantage when you're fishing?
Rick
I don't know how often it's been an advantage to my fishing as far as success goes. I like to think it has. I fished with many great fishermen that didn't know much about insects and they've caught a lot of fish. But on the other hand, it makes it a whole heck of a lot more interesting because fly fishing for trout is so connected to the insects and the food that they're eating and the patterns that you use that it just makes it a whole lot more interesting I think to know some of the basics about aquatic insects and for me personally going to a stream is as much about seeing the the puzzle and the mystery of what the insects are doing and how that reflects to how the fish are feeding. To me, that's sort of the juice that I find exciting about fly fishing is that connection between what the fish are feeding on, the insect life that's there, form the feed on, and what the behavior of the insect is at that day. And you can go out and put on a woolly bugger or a Chernobyl ant and catch trout. But to me, the real excitement is going deeper and looking at really the behavior of the fish related to the behavior of the insects and connecting those.
Katie
So is it fair to assume that you're an observer when you get to a river? Are you flipping rocks and, you know, looking at spider webs and all that jazz of getting a full picture of where you're fishing before you actually tie anything on and start?
Rick
Oh yeah, outhouses are a great place to look at spider webs. The first stop of the day sometimes is the outhouse, check out the spiderwebs, but anywhere along the stream. I always tell people, you see the little foam and stuff at the eddies on the edge of the river or the lake, and it looks like a bunch of crud and kind of slimy goop. Well, really look closely at it, and you've got all kinds of aquatic insect exoskeletons or shucks that have been emerging in that stuff. It'll tell what insects have been hatching, what kind of fly patterns you might want to put on. There's all sorts of clues out there. And, and it's just fun, I think, to pay attention to those clues. It's just kind of neat, you know.
Katie
I have to wonder as, as someone who's, you know, more professionally trained in this world, how, how specific are you when you're looking at these things? Are you saying, oh, that's a such and such species. I have the perfect fly, you know, that I've tied up just for that? Or are you, are you still, when you go fishing kind of more of a general, you know, I'm just looking for the size and shape and color of these things and trying to, you know, roughly match it with a pattern. Like how, how detailed does your mind go when you are looking in the film and seeing what's there?
Rick
Yeah. So it's at two levels. One is when I see, you know, what it is, I go, holy cow, that's a Swalia. I haven't seen one of those in a year and a half, you know, holy cow, that's really cool. So I like to look at the insects at a pretty defined, refined level. But when I put on the fly, I fish very impressionistic flies. I try if, and it really depends on where you're fishing. I mean, if you're in a stream that's not very productive, like I floated the middle fork of the Salmon River, a great example, pristine wilderness stream. It's very unproductive. The water is not high in nutrients. It's a granitic geology, which doesn't produce a lot of phosphorus and nitrogen in the water. So it's not a productive system. Those trout are not selective. They have to eat anything that comes along because there's not a lot of food out there. And so when you fish the middle fork of the salmon, you put on a small terrestrial pattern, a hopper, you know, an ant or something like that. You fish it all day long and you catch fish all day long. The fish have to take it. They're looking up for anything they can find to eat. You go to another stream like, say, the Deschutes in Oregon or, say, the Snake River in Idaho or any of those really productive streams, those fish get very selective. And you're fishing, you know, Silver Creek in Idaho is a great, I mean, it has got so many insects, so much bug life. Those fish get ultra selective. And there, you really have to pay attention. You don't need to know the scientific name of what they're eating, but you need to know if it's a little blue-winged olive mayfly or if it's that size 22 midge. And you need to match a fly pattern very closely to it to have success. And you might have to have the right emerger pattern, you know, where you've got the right little floating nymph in the film, not just the dry fly, but you might have to have that floating nymph in the film to really be successful. So it varies a lot with the system you're fishing and the kind of productivity and production of the system.
Katie
I don't know if you'll know this, but I get what you are saying when you say that, you know, this unproductive river, the fish need to take what they can get because they're only going to get so much food. But in the productive rivers where they have a wide variety, what makes them be selective? Why wouldn't you still just say, hey, I want to eat as much food as I can and fatten up. It doesn't matter. I just am happy. I have a variety maybe and plentiful food. Why the need to be selective? Why not still just eat everything that comes past if it's all edible and you're a trout and you can eat bugs?
Rick
Yeah. Well, that's a great question. I don't know that I have the answer. The theory that makes sense to me is called when there's a lot of things around to feed on, you can waste energy making a decision. You know, is that food? Is that food? Is that food? And, and whereas if you develop a search image for one particular thing that at that moment is extremely abundant, right? It changes day to day, hour to hour. So it doesn't mean you're locked into this for, you know, long periods of time, but for that moment in time, there's a certain food item that is in greater abundance than most other things and you develop a search image for it, you're much more efficient in just zeroing in on that search and going for it.
Katie
Yeah. This color brown at this size, I've established that that's food and it's good. So, you know, if I see anything in my periphery that matches that, I'll take that. I don't have to think about anything else. It's just, okay.
Rick
Exactly. Exactly.
Katie
It just makes you wonder though, all the interesting things that trout do that you can speculate, but at the end of the day, there's just no real way to really know what's going on in their heads.
Rick
Well, let's think of it. Here's an analogy. Let's say someone threw out in a floor in a room a thousand dimes and a hundred quarters. And your job is to pick up as much money in a short period of time as you can. Well, if there's a thousand dimes, you want to focus on the dimes. You don't want to go searching for a few of those quarters.
Katie
Right.
Rick
You want to pick up every dime you see. And if you get a good search image, you're going to be a lot faster, man, picking up every dime you see. And, you know, you don't have to think about even paying attention to the quarters.
Katie
Yeah, I think I've heard like a similar analogy. If, you know, if you're sitting on a conveyor belt and burgers are coming by and you're eating the burgers and you know you like them, then a salad comes by. You're like, I can probably eat this, but I know I can eat the burgers. And I know that a bunch more are coming. So I'm just going to like not risk it with this salad and I'll just wait for the burgers to come past.
Rick
Exactly.
Katie
But yeah, I mean, I guess I just, in my mind, fish just are feeding machines. So, you know, they would just take any opportunity to eat, you know, whatever came past.
Rick
Yeah, I know. There's been a lot, I've done a lot of trout stomach studies myself where you, you know, kind of through fisheries departments, I've been working with them looking at fish stomachs. And it's interesting because you'll get a fish, usually the fish, when you clean it and really start looking at stomachs carefully, there's not a lot of variety in the stomach. It's usually one or two things that are dominating. And it just seems like that's what was dominant in the water column when they were feeding. But then you go to the next fish and it might be different things, but it'll still be focused on a few items, not a lot of variety.
Katie
So for two fish from the same time and area, you might find two kind of different feeding patterns or do they tend to kind of line up with each other?
Rick
I would say if they're in real close proximity, it's going to be very similar. But if you go a hundred yards downstream, it might be different.
Katie
Okay. Yeah. So I kind of want to pivot a little bit into some of the major groups that people might be familiar with and kind of, you know, what they're like, what their life cycles are and how they fit into the world of fish and their diet. So I know you mentioned the big three. I think you could maybe add on there, chironomids, if we're talking about fishing. And of course, everything else that's kind of in its own category. But I'd love to hear kind of about those big groups and how they cycle through their lives, the different stages and how they relate to fly fishing. And you're welcome to start wherever you want, but I'd just love to kind of hear an overview of those.
Rick
Okay. Well, I'm going to start with mayflies for a couple of reasons. If you look at the history of fly fishing literature, mayflies, in my mind, stand out as being talked about maybe more than just about any other group. And I think there is a logical reason for that. If you are a fish and you wanted to design an insect that was easy to feed on, you'd come up with something like a mayfly. Everything about their life cycle makes it easy for trout to see them and eat them. The nymphs, of course, most of their life cycle, the nymphs are on the bottom of the stream and not hugely available. But then there's a whole group of mayflies called swimmers where the nymphs are readily available in the nymphal stage. But when they're mature and ready to go, they got to swim up to the surface. They swim through the water column and they like coming up and it's a fat piece of morsel of food that a trout doesn't have any trouble seeing and eating. Then they hit the surface film and it takes them a while to pop out. And then they float on the surface and then they go up and then they come back to lay their eggs and they die on the surface. So their whole life cycle has multiple opportunities for trout to feed on them and see them easily. And you have a rich diversity of species that live across the wide range of stream types. Lakes have a much sparser community of mayflies, but they're still out there. So you've got a wide variety. And the mayfly species tend to be dominated in cold water systems, right? You don't find as many mayflies in warm water streams. So they prefer the same habitat conditions that trout prefer. So if you've got a good, healthy system for trout, you've got a good, healthy system for mayflies in just about every case. So I think the mayfly life cycle is just perfectly suited to feed trout. And they're easy for fly fishermen to see. They pop up on the surface and you go, whoa, look, there it is. know, and then they land there to lay their eggs and there they are again. So they're easy for fishermen to see. And it's obvious the trout are feeding on them. So I think just the history and everything about their life cycle is, I think to me, they're like the, the, the main kind of bug of interest to fly fishermen for hundreds of years. It's been kind of interesting.
Katie
So what is their life cycle?
Rick
Most of them are one year long. And for, say, 11 months of that year, they're in the underwater stage as an aquatic nymph, mostly feeding on algal material, plant material, diatoms. And as an insect, to grow, they have to molt. So each time they get a little bigger, they molt. They molt 20 to 30 times. Once they're mature, the nymphal stage is going to swim up towards the surface film. The exoskeleton of the nymph splits open, and the first wing stage, which anglers call the dun stage, pops out on the surface of the water. That stage flies off, lands on the foliage, and in about 12 to 24 hours, it molts one more time into the reproductive stage. The dun is not fully reproductive yet. Reproductive organs aren't fully developed, so it molts into the spinner. Spinners mate in the air. The females, after mating, just fall to the water and start laying eggs. And the wing stages, the dun stage lives maybe a day or two, and the spinner stage can live as short as an hour or as long as another day or two. So the whole wing stage lasts maybe three or four or five days. Most of the time, it's just one or two days.
Katie
So the duns of the day are not the same spinners that are following that evening. It's delayed by a day or two?
Rick
Yes. Okay. That's right. I didn't know that. That's right. And the other fascinating thing is, so mayflies are a very ancient group. There's fossil records that basically are the proto-mayfly that go back 300 million years. So they've been around forever. They were landing, you know, 60 million years ago, the same mayflies we see today were landing on dinosaurs.
Katie
Wow.
Rick
I always think that's great. You know, if this mayfly lands on you, you go, you know, that guy's ancestor landed on a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Katie
I wonder how many great, great, great, great whatevers would be in that family tree. I think we're talking 10 to a power.
Rick
Probably 60 million years. They've got a one-year life cycle, so you can just figure it out. the 60 million years of life cycles. But when they emerge in the surface to the dun, they lose their mouth parts. So they can't feed at all when they get wings. They have no mouth. They can't take water in. So they're not going to live very long. And so that's one reason they have a very short adult lifespan is they don't have any way of eating or drinking. And that's a very primitive trait, as you can imagine. And molting, they're the only insect group that molts when they have wings. Mayflies molt from the dun to the spinner. There's no other insect group that molts when it has wings.
Katie
I guess I didn't know I knew that, but come to think of it, I mean, you don't hear about dun and spinner caddisflies. You know, dun and spinner is very much like a mayfly terminology. So even though I couldn't have told you that I knew that, you know, caddisflies or stoneflies didn't do that, I feel like I inherently knew that that terminology was kind of attached to mayflies.
Rick
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. And the technical name for the dun is the sub-imago. Imago means adult. And so they're the sub-adult stage. And then the spinner is the imago stage, the true adult. Yeah. But yeah, so they're really interesting that way. Stone flies are interesting. Their life cycle is a little more variable in terms of length. The big famous stoneflies like salmonflies and golden stones, they take three to four years as a nymph to grow to full size. Most of your other stoneflies, the nymphal life stage, again, is roughly a year long. And then the adults live maybe a couple of weeks, 10 days to two weeks is kind of a normal time for adult stoneflies to live. And they, of course, have functional mouth parts and they can take water in and they don't munch down on much as an adult. They might get some nectar off of flowers or stuff. But that length of the nymphal stage can be quite long for some species. And there's very, very few stoneflies that live in lakes. There are some, but it's a very few number of species that live in lakes. So they're really pretty much restricted to moving water and also water that's quite cold. And again, there are species that do pretty well in warmer water, but the majority of species prefer cold water. They have a very poorly developed gill system on a lot of stonefly nymphs. So they have to be in water that has high oxygen content. And cold water holds more oxygen than warm water. So again, it kind of focuses their area on cold water streams. And in pollution studies, stoneflies will often be some of the first species to disappear.
Katie
So if they have mouthparts as an adult, but they're not doing a lot of feeding, what are they doing for that week or two that they're just flying around? You know, and mayflies seem like they have a very, you know, they've got a targeted goal. They're going to mate and then they're going to die. And stoneflies, it sounds like they're just kind of wandering around doing whatever for a little bit.
Rick
Yeah, they are. They're just kind of, they don't molt again. They kind of just fly around. And I, you know, it's a good question. I know like, you know, dragonflies, the females will molt. They'll mate more than once. I don't know if that's true for stonefly females. I think they only mate with one male and then they'll start laying eggs. But it may take a while, especially for the bigger ones, for those eggs to complete development in the body before they're ready for mating. I see. Okay. Yeah. So there's probably some of that going on too. And, oh, the other cool thing about stonefly adults, though, is that a lot of people don't know this, but the males and females drum to attract each other. They have special plates on the underside of the end of their abdomen for drumming on the vegetation. They'll drum on the twigs on the trees and it sends the vibrations through the wood. And then they pick up those vibrations with their antenna. And the males have one very specific drumbeat. The females reply with a different drumbeat. And every species is different. And so I've got a whole DVD on acoustic communication of stoneflies by this professor down in Texas who studied it for decades. And he's recorded all these different stonefly drumming sounds on acoustic material that you could actually pick up on a recorder.
Katie
Oh, wow.
Rick
And it's amazing to listen to all these stoneflies drumming. And so when you're sitting on a stream bank and there's stoneflies on the trees, just know that there's this drum fest going on all around you.
Katie
So this isn't like something you'd hear like a cricket chirping. This is something that's just being felt in the vibrations of the twigs that they're on?
Rick
Yes, that's right. Unfortunately, we don't hear it. Or maybe fortunately, I don't know. But the guy that studied it actually put them on material that was resonant enough. You could pick up the sound itself and recorded it.
Katie
Oh, that's so cool. I've never heard that before.
Rick
Yeah. Oh, it's amazing. It's really amazing. Yeah. And as a drummer myself, I always kind of find that kind of cool.
Katie
I did see the drums behind you. I was wondering if those were yours or a child's.
Rick
Yeah. Yeah, I started playing drums when I was like 10 years old too. So drums and I do the same thing now that I did when I was 10. I collect insects, I go fishing and I play drums.
Katie
Well, there's worse things to do with your life for sure.
Rick
That's probably much. That's all. That's my life story is right there. It's all I've ever done.
Katie
So tell me about caddisflies. Unless there's more fun facts you have for stoneflies, which I'm happy to soak those up if you've got more.
Rick
Yeah. Well, caddisflies, they're the most diverse group. There's more species of caddisflies than all mayflies, stoneflies put together.
Katie
Oh, wow. Okay.
Rick
Yeah. So they're really diverse. And there's a wide range of species that live in lakes as well as streams. And there's actually some species that are terrestrial. Most people don't realize that. But there are some caddis species that are terrestrial. And they live in real wet environments. I was down in Costa Rica in the tropics. And I'm looking around. Of course, love to look at insects in the tropics, right? And I see this caddis fly walking on a log up in the forest. And I'm going, holy cow, it's a caddis fly. It's a terrestrial caddis fly. That was really cool. And it had a case and everything, just like aquatic.
Katie
Oh, really? Do they still build the same like gravelly?
Rick
Yeah, it was made out of wood. You know, little bits of leaf and wood material. But yeah, I made a case and it was walking around with a case.
Katie
So are those are those species still important for trout or do they like not do that much with the water? Like would they would they kind of live separate lives?
Rick
They live separately from the water. Yeah. So the diversity of caddisflies is quite broad in the kind of habitat that they can live in. And there's a lot of diversity in their sensitivity to water quality, too. So even in streams that start to, you know, really get on the edge of quality for trout, you know, there's this interesting kind of challenge in terms of protecting streams and stream quality and stuff. Sometimes streams in their most natural state is not the most productive state. And as humans come in and start interacting with the landscape, we generally, for a variety of reasons, increase the nutrients coming in, either through soil erosion or direct application of fertilizers. So in a lot of cases, we've bumped up the productivity of streams through our human activities to where maybe there's even higher trout populations than there would have been naturally. But it's a slippery slope. You can quickly go past that improvement to a real serious decline. And that's, of course, the problem where you have more and more people and more and more human activity and bigger problems. Well, caddisflies will be one of those groups that really become more abundant as you kind of change the conditions from maybe more perfect conditions for stoneflies and mayflies to less desirable, but still really quite healthy for fish. And you'll see a lot of real productive streams have big caddis hatches. And so throughout trout fishing, pretty much across the country, my guess is if you went back 200 years before Europeans were prevalent in, or maybe 500 years, there wouldn't be as abundance of caddis that we have today. They'd still be a good diversity and there'd be lots of them, but it wouldn't be as abundant. That's just a wild guess. But at any rate, caddis now are often extremely abundant and one of the more dominant foods out there for fish to feed on.
Katie
I do feel like caddisflies are often the thickest hatches I see. Sometimes it happens with mayflies too, not so much with stoneflies, but I feel like when you hit a caddis hatch on the right day, it feels like you're almost trapped in a cloud of them. Exactly. You feel a little claustrophobic, like there's too many bugs around me right now. Maybe you don't get that feeling as an entomologist.
Rick
Oh, no. The Deschutes River in Oregon, I don't know how many of your viewers would know about the Deschutes. It's a pretty well-known stream in Oregon and other in North America. But at any rate, 20 years ago, the caddis hatches were epic. And the joke was that when you're cooking dinner and you had your camp lantern going, you know, which the caddis are attracted to the light, you'd be eating as many caddis, you know, in your spaghetti sauce as you would be anything else. And it's true. I mean, in the morning, you'd have piles of dead caddis around your lantern. I mean, inches thick of dead caddis. Unfortunately, today, because they've had some issues with how the dams are operated that have really changed the river, that's not happening. And so I've been really involved in some, you know, trying to get some water quality changes in the river. But yes, caddis can be overwhelmingly abundant. Like you say, a little claustrophobic.
Katie
And they love to land on you too. I feel like when there's a caddis hatch, I feel creepy crawlies all over me because they just want to land on your legs and crawl and, you know, they're just getting everywhere. Do you ever get one in your ear? Oh, I'm sure I have. I don't remember a specific time, but yeah.
Rick
Yeah. Yeah. They're everywhere. But the caddisflies have a one-year life cycle primarily. There's some species with a shorter life cycle and there's some mayflies and stoneflies too that have a life cycle that's less than a year and you'll get multiple hatches of the same species in one year. But caddis in general, they're going to have a one year life cycle. And the thing with caddis that's totally different than mayflies or stoneflies, they have a pupa stage. So they have complete metamorphosis where they have to go like a caterpillar going through a chrysalis before it becomes a butterfly. That's what caddisflies have to do. They have to go through that pupa stage. Mayflies and stoneflies don't have that stage to go through. And so that's difference in behavior and big difference in flight patterns because you're going to want caddis pupa patterns. And caddis pupa swim really well. They come up from the stream bottom where they develop. They cut out of a little shelter when the pupa is mature. And then they swim up as a pupa to the surface. And then the exoskeleton of the pupa splits open and the adult, the caddis flies away, but that pupa swims up very fast. And so fishing techniques tend to be real different when a caddis hatches on than say when a mayfly hatches on. Mayflies, it's always drag free. You want that nice natural drift with no unusual motion, no drag. With caddis, you know, it's, who was it Leonard M. Wright wrote the book the sudden inch or fishing a caddis pattern with a little inch twitch to it and well fishing is a living insect that's what it was Leonard M. Wright fishing is a living insect and it was all about fishing caddis with little twitches and stuff and fishing pupa patterns you can you know use a lysen ring lift and other methods to swing it and get it to come kind of scooting up towards the surface kind of with some induced activity and behavior to look natural.
Katie
Got it. Now, what differentiates a pupa from, let's say, like a mayfly nymph? I know, obviously, the mayfly, you said, doesn't have that same ability to swim strongly. It's more kind of going with the current. But physically, like what differentiates a pupa from just like a nymph stage of any other insect?
Rick
So you could think of the pupa stage as the final instar of a mayfly nymph. So an instar refers to each time it molts, it's, you know, if it's got 30 molts, it means it has 30 instars. And the final instar is the last molt before it becomes a winged insect. So that final instar of a mayfly nymph would be when the wing pads are fully developed. You can see the wing pads on the back of the nymph. All the adult features of the mayfly dun are inside that last nymphal instar. So if you opened it up with a pair of forceps and a scalpel, you could dissect out that dun sage. It would be in there. Well, that doesn't happen with a caddis larva. The caddis larva doesn't develop any of those adult features. It doesn't develop wing pads. It doesn't develop any of the long antennae. It just stays like the larva would look. All of those adult characteristics come about during the pupil stage. And so what that allows one thing to happen is that the larva can inhabit very different kinds of habitats, and then it can crawl out to a different area to pupate and then pop up as an adult. So the larva become a little bit more specialized in how they feed and maybe the habitat they live in, because they don't have to worry about trying to also fit into an adult shape. All they have to do is be a larva shape. They don't have to fit into an adult shape.
Katie
Right. So like a mayflies, I'm sure they're not thinking about it so logically, but they have to live in a way that when they're ready to become an adult, that's still suitable for being an adult because it's going to happen so quickly. They're going to need to just rise up and become one. Whereas a caddis can kind of live its life as an immature insect. And then when it's ready, it can be like, now it's time to transition to this next stage of my life. And we're leaving this behind. We're becoming something new.
Rick
Exactly. Exactly.
Katie
And what happens then when they, so when they come to the surface, what's the next stage there?
Rick
Yeah, so it's the winged adult caddisfly pops out, flies off. And they go, I'll land on the stream side foliage. And they, mayflies mate in the air. Mayflies have the mating swarms up in the air. You can see them, the little dancing mayflies. Stonefly adults mate on the foliage. And then the females fly back to lay their eggs. And caddis also mate on the foliage, and then the females return to lay their eggs. And one of the neat things with a lot of caddis, especially the species that trout fishermen often encounter, the females don't just land on the surface and release the eggs and the eggs sink. The females actually dive under the water and swim to the bottom. And then they grab a rock on the bottom of the stream, lay their eggs, and then they come floating back up to the surface. And when they're underwater, they're enclosed in a little bubble of air. They're like in a little glass diving ball. And the females, if you look at a male caddis and a female caddis, the hind legs on a female caddis are real broad for swimming. Where if you look at the male legs, they're just real skinny sticks because they don't have to swim. And so the females are designed for swimming underwater.
Katie
Wow. So I don't know if I've ever fished a pattern that mimics this, but is this something that anglers really target? the stage of them diving underneath. I've seen some caddis patterns that do appear to have some sort of, I don't know if I'd call it a bubble, but it looks kind of like that. But I've always assumed that that was more of a pupil stage that I was looking at. But now I'm wondering if maybe these things are meant to mimic some sort of air pocket.
Rick
So Gary LaFontaine in the book Caddis Flies that he wrote back in the mid 80s, he has a whole bunch of information on the diving adult caddis. And he has patterns for diving adults. And I had this epiphany not that long ago. I get asked all the time, why does a prince nymph work so well? And I think it's because they look like a diving adult caddis. Really? Yep. Those white colored biots that go over the back of a prince nymph, I think it looks like the white, really sparkly conditions of the air bubbles that are on a diving adult caddis. Because they really sparkle and they're almost shining underneath the water. I think a prince nymph, this is total theory on my part, but I think a prince nymph works partly because it's looking like a diving adult caddis.
Katie
Wow, I've always associated a prince nymph with being a stonefly pattern, but I do feel like it works better than other patterns I consider stonefly patterns, and my guess has always just been it looks perfectly buggy. Like if you were to design a nymph, I feel like if you told a child to draw a nymph and they knew what they were going for, it would kind of come out looking like a prince nymph, like very generally that, but that's interesting. I'll have to try one next time I'm there with some caddis coming off and see what happens.
Rick
Well, see, I always have the problem of trying to associate a fly pattern with an insect behavior. And it's probably total BS, but... It gives you something to do. It gives me something to do.
Katie
Do you... I know you said you fish more impressionistic patterns, but I definitely go to certain impressionistic patterns with the idea that I think it looks like this. And so I'm going to fish it as that. And there's like a confidence to it where, you know, I think a hares ear is a caddis pattern. And I know some people think it's all kinds of other things, but it's in my caddis box. Do you think that much about those patterns that are a little bit more vague where you have a, you see it and you're like, that's a such and such. And I'm going to fish it so confidently when that insect's coming off. But if it's not, I don't, I kind of shy away from it because, you know, in my mind, it's one thing.
Rick
Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. When I say impressionistic, I don't mean that I fish it for any kind of, you know, wide range of insects. I guess what I mean is that I don't try to tie a pattern that has six legs, the exact number of tails, two antenna. You know, I don't try to tie those that are great, awesome patterns for fly tying displays. But I don't think they fish that well. I like patterns that are going to be the right size. I think size, if the fish are selective, I think size is critical. If they're a size 18 and you're using a 16, you're not going to catch as many fish. So I want something that's the right size. I want something that's the right silhouette. If it's a skinny swimming mayfly, I don't want to use a real fat nymph. I want to use a little slender nymph or a chironomid pattern. You know, they're all real skinny because the naturals are skinny and slender. and then color. I have a real hang up on color in the sense that I don't think it's that important. Really? Okay. Yeah. Fly tires go nuts about color. I mean, you know, if you're, when I'm doing fly tying demonstrations, there's always somebody in a group will say, now, what dubbing did you use for that? Was it a hairline number 382 or was it hairline number 445? You know, I go, I have no clue and I don't really care. You know, if the bug is olive, I'll use some sort of general olive color. And it might even be tan and I don't really care. I want it to be the right size, the right silhouette, and I want to fish it with the right behavior. And if I collect, if I collect a hundred blue-winged olive nymphs on the same rock, I'll guarantee you there'll be five shades of colors among those hundred nymphs. And so does the fish have a preference for one color or another? Well, we all know that sometimes changing color makes a difference in the fish you catch. Like somebody will swear that that day they were taken yellow and they just hammered the fish on something yellow or purple or bright green, whatever it was. But in general, I don't think color's all that critical.
Katie
I have to agree with you on the fly tying part. I'm not an experienced tire, but I do tie. And the book I follow when I'm looking for patterns does give the specific color that you need. And I'm like, it's brown. I'll just pick a brown or I'll pick a green. It's like brown, green, black, white. It's a very simple color palette for me, which is good. It seems like I would get frustrated trying to be a little too specific with the color.
Rick
Yeah. Well, and it does matter some days. You can be out, say, fishing woolly buggers. You put on a black woolly bugger, which is great, and you fish it and you're not doing too well. And you put on a purple woolly bugger and all of a sudden, boom, you're really catching fish. So there's no question color is a factor in what fish might be preferring. But when it comes to matching hatches, it's kind of lower down the ladder that I want to pay attention to.
Katie
Well, I think for woolly buggers, the difference is that it's imitating something larger like a bait fish or, you know, a black one would be a leech, whereas a green one would be something completely different. Like we're talking about two completely different animals there that they might be feeding on. Whereas, you know, a light green versus a dark green, the BWOs that day are likely, they're on a spectrum and it's not indicating a different animal. It's just a slight natural variation.
Rick
Yes, that's a great way of putting it.
Katie
So you mentioned chironomids. I'd like to hear about that too as kind of another group. I know it's not one of the big three, but it's, you know, arguably just as important, if not more important, I feel like for a lot of trout, in certain waterways at least.
Rick
Well, and as streams become more stressed and less favorable for mayflies and stoneflies, there's going to be more chironomids around. Chironomids are truly hugely diverse. I mean, there's thousands of species of chironomids. And so, and they live in every water type you can imagine. If you see water anywhere, whether it's a puddle in your driveway or a pristine trout stream, there's going to be chironomids in it. So they're everywhere. And they're one of the most dominant foods trout eat. Any trout study, stomach study that I've read, all the ones I've done. The big three in trout stomachs in just about any study is chironomids are usually number one in terms of just overall abundance in the stomachs. Chironomids are number one. Blue-winged olive nymphs are right up there, number two. And then number three might be a caddis, certain caddis larva, like a net-spinning caddis larva, something like that hydropsychids but chironimids and blue-winged olives are almost always number one and two
Katie
I didn't realize it'd be so specific to to BWOs versus just like midges then mayflies then whatever like to hear that it's that specific mayflies is really cool
Rick
BWOs are incredibly important for your fishing and for trout food the the nymphs are extremely mobile and so even when they're not emerging or they're very active and they drift there's this whole aspect of insect ecology on stream drift and when insects drift and what species drift more than other insect species and chironomids and bluing olives are big drifters and because trout tend to feed in what's drifting in the water column. They see those groups a lot. And the other reason bluing olives are so prevalent is that bluing olives are kind of like the red tail hawk of mayflies. You know, if you're out there looking for raptors, you know, you're going to see a red tail hawk. They're everywhere. And if you aren't sure what it is, it's, well, it's a red tail.
Katie
Probably a redtail.
Rick
Yeah. Well, blue-winged olives are like everywhere. They're in every trout stream you've ever fished. There's blue-winged olives. I would get. I almost guarantee it. And they're probably abundant.
Katie
What level on the taxonomical scale is BWO? Is that a family? Is that a genus? What level are we talking about? Are there lots of species within that group?
Rick
Yes, there are. And that's a great question because most of the common names that anglers use don't apply to a single species. They apply to a group of species. The bluing dollop is a pretty large group. Really, it's applicable to the family level, the family B to D. The majority of ones that you run into are going to be in the genus Betis or Betis. You can say it either way. But there are other genera as well that are quite common. The one that hatches in the fall that's really small, like a size 20, bluing olive, is in a genus called Ascentrella. There's other real common genus called Difetter. And there's a number of others. And so it's kind of the family level that the common name applies to more than anything.
Katie
So I got a sidetracked here on BWOs, but back to midges. What's a midge's life cycle like? And then how does it go about its life?
Rick
Yeah, it's often very short. They go through the life cycle like a caddis, so they have a larval stage pupa and then the adult, so they have a pupa stage, which is what we imitate most of the time when we're fishing chironomids is the pupa stage. And a lot of times these life cycles are completed within four to six weeks instead of a year. In the summertime, when the waters are warmer, they can crank through a couple of generations in the summer. And then they'll have another generation or two during the winter. And there's going to be chironomid hatches every month of the year, every week of the year. There's going to be chironomids emerging just because there's so many different species. And they've adapted to so many different conditions. The larvae live on the lake or the stream bottom. And the other thing that chironomids have adapted to is very low oxygen levels. So in lakes, they do well in very deep water, below the thermocline, down there where there's not much oxygen, not much sunlight. They can feed on bacteria and fungus in the substrate, in the mud, rather than more actively growing plant material. And they can survive down there in very low oxygen. And so a lot of the chironomid fishing in lakes takes place in 20, 30 feet of water. And that's one of the few insects that's down there. There's not many other insects down there.
Katie
You mentioned that they can hatch all year long, which I knew about them. And I also have, I feel like of all the other flies I can think of that I might use in the winter, BWOs also come to mind as something that may be hatching basically any month of the year, depending on where you are. Is that another reason maybe that those are kind of the top two is they're available all year long. So they're kind of what we talked about earlier, where if you know that this food source is good, then you're going to keep keying in on that. And if you know that that food source is available year round, then you might be more likely to kind of add that to your favorites and feed on it a lot.
Rick
Absolutely. And BWOs, besides having a variety of species that have slightly different timing to their hatches, they go through two or three generations a year as well. So it doesn't take them a whole year. Usually you get, say, the same species, say baetis tricaudatus, which is very common, hatches in, you know, February and March. And then it hatches again in late June and July. And then it hatches again in late September and October. So that one species will hatch three times during the season. And then you have other species overlapping with that. So, yes, blue-winged olives are around a lot.
Katie
The last group that I know might be a little bit difficult to really consider a single group would be terrestrials. Like that's the last thing I think of as kind of a major group. But that, of course, is very varied from ants to beetles to grasshoppers. If you had to give kind of like a 30,000 foot view, since we don't have time to go through every single one, it just kind of like how not necessarily the life cycles, but how terrestrials fit into like a trout's diet. Does that vary a lot around the country or time of year? I know they're kind of a summer thing usually.
Rick
Yeah, it's going to vary with time of year. And a part of my thesis that I did for my master's is I put out, I did a lot of stomach samples on trout. And I also had all kinds of insect sampling I was doing at the same time, including floating traps that would collect whatever's falling in. And this was on a coastal stream in Oregon. And the coastal streams aren't overly productive like some places, other places would be with aquatic insects, but they still have a good, healthy population. And I was looking at steelhead juveniles, cutthroat and coho juveniles. And cutthroat and coho tend to live in slower water, more pool habitat in the small coastal streams. And they were in the summer eating 80% terrestrial food. The steelhead juveniles that stayed in faster water, they never really focused heavily on terrestrials. They certainly ate it, but it wasn't the dominant part of their diet. So if you look at what kind of trout you might be fishing for, brown trout versus rainbow versus cutthroat, So, you know, if those that spend a little more time in slower water are going to focus more on terrestrial food. White fish, you know, focus almost entirely on nymphs and larvae that are underwater. So it varies a little bit with fish species. But in the summertime, terrestrials are really important. Really important.
Katie
I assume they would be kind of a big meaty meal, like hard to pass up a full meal in a single bite versus having to eat a thousand midges, you know.
Rick
Yeah, they are. And it's like the salmon, middle fork, the salmon too, where it's not productive in stream. They really depend on terrestrial insects to get enough food. I mean, it's really a critical part of their diet. And ants, you know, I would never go fishing without ants in my fly box. Ants are just such a good thing to fish. From spring through fall, you know, they can be periods of time when ants are just going to outfish anything.
Katie
I have had ants save my day more than once where it seems to be the only thing that works.
Rick
Yeah.
Katie
So, yeah, I don't often see trout feeding on ants, but it might just be because they're so small that I'm not noticing them. Whereas if you see a hopper hit the water, you're going to watch it, you know, as far as you can see it and see if something comes and grabs it.
Rick
Exactly. Exactly. And hoppers are fun to fish and, you know, hopper dropper is a great technique. So, you know, it's, it's a logical thing to do for sure in the summertime, especially, but ants are just something you should have, you know, with you when you go out just in case.
Katie
So I have to finish up on like one final question just to wrap it up. If you had to pick one nymph and one dry fly to, you know, if you could only carry these two flies for the rest of your life and nothing else, what would you choose? Kind of considering maybe, you know, which ones do a good job of imitating a lot of things very well.
Rick
Well, keep in mind that we're talking about trout fishing here.
Katie
Yes, trout specifically.
Rick
Yeah. I would probably have for a nymph, can I pick two nymphs?
Katie
All right, sure.
Rick
I usually fish two nymphs at the same time.
Katie
Okay, we'll give it, if they're at the same time, we'll give you both of them.
Rick
And that would be a green rockworm larva pattern, about a size 14 and then a size 18 blue wing olive nymphs.
Katie
Okay.
Rick
Those two fish together. If I could just fish nothing but those two, I'd be a happy camper. And then for dry fly, that's a tough one. You know, we just talked about ants. That would be a seductive one to pick.
Katie
Hard to see, though, sometimes. I don't know which ants you fish, but my ants that I fish are usually really hard to see.
Rick
Mine are pretty small, 18s, 16s, 18s, the kind of normal size. It would be a small fly. It wouldn't be a big one. I wouldn't pick a chubby Chernobyl. No way.
Katie
Yeah, I agree with that. I would agree with that, yeah. In the summer, though, I might. I think I could get away with one from June to August. I could fish nothing but a chubby or a hopper of some sort.
Rick
Yeah, I know. I would probably pick a small mayfly pattern, like a size 18 blue winged olive.
Katie
So you're really leaning heavily on the BWO. That's most of your range.
Rick
Yeah, I am. I know. Well, the thing is, you know, a little blue winged olive could also look like, you know, depending on how you tweak the wings, it could be a little spinner pattern. You can make it look. And I really like the hair up done as far as the style of mayfly pattern I fish. Yeah, I would probably go with the size 16 or an 18 blue and gallop for a dry fly.
Katie
I might have to fish the Rick Hafele special sometime and rig this up as a dry double dropper if the dry is big enough to hold them both. But try that and see how it works.
Rick
You'll need the chubby Chernobyl for the hold them up.
Katie
I do a lot of dry dropper fishing. I end up fishing a lot of large dries because of it. I don't love indicator and anything. I will when it really calls for it. But if I can get away with a dry fly on top, I'm going to do it. But it leads me to fishing a lot of big stuff. So if they're eating small flies, it doesn't always do that well for me.
Rick
Is euro nymphing becoming popular out there where you're at in Colorado?
Katie
It is. I haven't tried it yet. But it's definitely pretty common out here.
Rick
Yeah, it's becoming very common out here. The guides have really gravitated to it in a lot of places. And it can be very effective.
Katie
Have you done it?
Rick
Yeah, I do it. I have the outfit. I've actually gone out with a fellow that's kind of a, I don't call him expert, but very good at it to learn more about the technique. And there's quite a bit to, you know, like anything like that, the honing the skill to really kind of fine tune it. There is quite a bit to it. I don't enjoy it personally as much because it's not fly casting.
Katie
Yeah.
Rick
And I do like fly casting a lot. And so you kind of eliminate a big chunk of what makes fly fishing fly fishing.
Katie
Yeah, I think it'd be fun to learn. And I think it would be fun to be able to fish through a run that's already been fished and pull out a couple extra trout that weren't playing ball with the previous angler, which is something I hear about a lot with your own nymph thing. But I do think I would never be able to commit to that just because I like watching a dry fly drift. I like participating in a hatch. And I think I'd get bored without the casting in the dry fly drifts.
Rick
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm kind of in the same boat. Yeah. So it's a very effective technique. There's some concern that has been raised by people that it's too effective. that if you're going to go through a run and you're going to catch, you know, 50% of the fish that are in that run, and even if you're using, they're all barbless hooks and you're letting them all go, well, even if you have 1% mortality, you know, you've killed or stressed quite a few fish in that run because you're just so darn effective. And if everybody starts doing that, if it becomes real popular and you get a dozen people going through that run, you're really, really impacting the fish more than you would with traditional gear. And, you know, that's a point. That's a good point.
Katie
Well, hopefully there's still enough people out there that are wanting to vary up their techniques to keep it a balanced amount.
Rick
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Humans have a tendency to love things to death. So hopefully your own nymphing won't go too far.
Katie
Well, just to wrap up, tell me where people can find you if they want to come to your website. And you've also got quite a few books out. I don't know if anything's recent, but feel free to plug any of your older books as well.
Rick
Yeah, the most recent stuff I have is on the website. It's also on Amazon. It's just Rick Hafele’s Favorite Fly Patterns. And you can just go, my website is rickhaefeli.com. Of course, nobody can spell my last name, but that's okay. I'll link to it. So people can just click the link. Yeah, it's just rickhaifley.com. And the things I have available, some of the older stuff and more recent stuff's all on there, which you can buy directly from me. Or if you want it signed, you know, my email's on my website. You can email me and we'll get it to you. Or they're happy to just go on Amazon. Most everything that's available is on Amazon too, and they can order it directly from Amazon. So I'd say my website's the place to go. I still do quite a few programs for fly fishing clubs. And those are listed on my website and how to get in touch with me. I've been doing zoom talks through COVID, which I'm still happy to do. And for, you know, traveling farther distances, I really liked the idea of doing it by zoom because you don't have to waste the energy to go by plane and, and all of that. But anyway, I'm still doing programs and enjoy that. And so happy to offer that to folks. But I'm not working on any new books right now.
Katie
Okay. And are most of your books like hatch related?
Rick
Yeah. Yep. Most of them are hatch related. And, you know, methods. I have the Nymph Fishing books, Nymph Fishing, Rivers and Streaming, which is focused on Nymph Fishing. So more technique. But all of my books have quite a bit of bug info in them.
Katie
Okay. Yeah. I think it makes sense for that to be the case. Well, Rick, this was super fun. I loved these little tidbits about the bugs we use all the time. I think a lot of people don't know much beyond this bug looks like this and therefore put that fly on. It's fun to kind of get a little bit of the backstory on these insects that we feel so connected to, but don't often take the time to learn more about them.
Rick
There's a lot of great mystery out there. The world's an awesome place. And I think the more you look at it closely, the more enjoyment you get out of it.
Katie
Absolutely.
Rick
Yeah.
Katie
We'll have to go look up, see if I can find some sounds of the stonefly drumming and see if I can find it online.
Rick
There you go. It'll be online. It'll be online. Check it out. Sounds good.
Katie
Well, I will let you get going to enjoy your evening, but I really appreciate you taking the time for this. This is a lot of fun.
Rick
Thanks for contacting me. It was a pleasure.
Katie
All right, guys. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to head over to the website, fishuntamed.com, for all episodes and show notes. And also, please subscribe on your favorite podcasting app. That'll get my episodes delivered straight to your phone. And also, if you have not yet, please consider going over to Apple Podcasts and leaving a rating or review. That's very helpful for me, and I'd greatly appreciate it. Other than that, thank you guys again for listening, and I will be back in two weeks. Bye, everybody.
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