Understand the Prey of a Fish

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Jim Dowd at Zoar Outdoor for Expert Village to talk with you about fly casting and fly fishing. One of the important things that you need to consider when you are trout fishing, or fishing for any kind of fish that is, is what their prey is. And it is really important to stop and take a few moments before you actually begin fishing to see what is going on. As Yogi Bear would say, you can observe a lot by just looking around. In this case, we approach the water looking to see if there was any obvious sign of predator activity, if there are any bugs floating on the surface, if there are any bugs falling off the branches; and what we saw were some minnows swimming around in this little pool. They are small enough that you probably can’t see them behind me, but using my net, my 2 nets, I was fortunate to enough to be able to capture 2, and in this case, what we’ve captured are called black nose dace. These are very common in New England streams. So now that I caught these 2, I have representative samples of what these forage might be, and I happen to know that this is a very delectable treat for large brown trout in the Deerfield River. So I know these fish are present, I know what their colors are, I can see for example that they’ve got a whitish silvery belly. They’ve got a black stripe on their sides, and they’ve got kind of a nice, medium brown top. So now that I’ve identified them and I know what their general shape is, I can look through my fly box and find a pattern that represents it. As it happens, I have a fly known as the black nose dace, and you’ll see that in this particular pattern it’s got a whitish belly with a little flash in it, a black lateral line stripe and a medium brown top. The size of this fly happens to correspond very well with the larger of these two dace. So I would start fishing with this fly if I didn’t see the trout obviously feeding on something else. By the way, once you’ve made the identification, release them unharmed. "