Tips on Fly Tying with Natural Fur

Video Transcript

"ALVIN DEDEUX: The two major components of the natural fly-tying materials are probably feathers and fur. And fur is obviously the fur off of some animal. And it comes in all kinds of forms. Like this is just a strip of a rabbit fur. This is a hare's mask. This is a moose body hair with the skin, the hide attached. These are bucktails. This is what we call dubbing which is mixtures of different types of fur and then obviously dyed in different colors. The two major categories of fur are your fur from your land animals and the fur from water animals like rabbits versus an otter or something like that. The otter fur will be waterproof so that would be better for a fly that you want to not absorb water maybe a floating fly versus the rabbit fur which will not be waterproof so that will be good for a sinking fly. But all types of fur will work, just depending on the application, sinking flies, floating flies, different specialty parts of flies. The moose hair is nice and long and stiff versus the bucktail which is soft and flexible so that would just--depending on what type of fly you're using, you're going to want to get the proper material to get the type of action that you need the fly to present in the water."