Caddisflies: A Guide to Eastern Species for Anglers and Other Naturalists

By Thomas Ames

Stunning and detailed color photographs of more than 100 species of caddisflies. Caddisfly hatches and how to identify them plus valuable tips on how to fish the hatch. Fly patterns for caddisfly pupae, larvae, nymph, and adults and includes 80 recipes for caddis patterns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Dec 4, 2008
• ISBN: 9780811742627

Book preview

Prologue

Lately, as an experiment, I have been asking my fellow fly fishers to list the visible attributes of a dog in such a way that it is clear they are not describing a cat. Few of them can, although I harbor not a shred of doubt that they know one from the other. When faced with recognizing the caddis hatch that is causing a pod of trout to pock the water in front of them, these same anglers are at an even greater disadvantage. The books on caddisflies that occupy so much space in our angling libraries provide little more than physical descriptions to aid us in our times of need.

The book that you have in your hand is full of photographs and other information that will help you identify many of the more common caddisflies as easily as you can name your relatives at a family reunion. If you are a fly fisher, it will teach you how to use that information to improve your catch and to achieve other, more intangible goals.

Most fly fishers know that an adult caddis has a pair of prominent antennae, six slender legs, no tail, and two pairs of wings, folded tentlike over an elongate abdomen, the outer pair covered in tiny hairs. They are aware that caddisflies come in a wide range of sizes and a finite array of colors. Anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of aquatic entomology knows that caddis larvae are inhabitants of our lakes and streams, and that many of them carry little houses on their backs. They might even have learned that some adults lay their eggs beneath the surface of the water while others do not. Beyond that, caddisflies are just bugs that all seem to be pretty much the same.

Look at the hatch charts offered by many northeastern fly shops for the early weeks of May and you will see an insect listed as a tan caddis. This generalized description usually encompasses species of several caddis families, including Hydropsychidae, Lepidostomatidae, and Glossosomatidae, about as biologically disparate a group as you could assemble. To give it a more familiar frame, and understand its diversity, consider that, among insects, the forty-five families of caddisflies worldwide make up just one taxonomic order, Trichoptera. In the same way, the eleven families that make up the single mammalian order, Carnivora, include dogs, bears, cats, weasels, mongooses, and sea lions.

For this deficiency in our general education we can blame our parents. Even before we could speak (and thus protest) they entertained us with books filled with vivid photographs and colorful illustrations of exotic birds, scary snakes and wily crocodiles, wild wolves and bears, playful seals, toothy sharks, monstrous whales and all sorts of fantastic deep-sea creatures, all far removed from our daily experience. We learned to recognize and name each and every one of them. But they never showed us picture books about caddisflies.

As the photography editor of my college newspaper I had the opportunity to cover the 1972 New Hampshire presidential primary. I’ve since lost track of the names of the dozen or so contenders who vied for the chance to deny Richard Nixon a second term, but I still recall my awe at the ability of these politicians to remember my name and the names of all the other amateur journalists who shared my beat. They had no descriptions or pictures to go by and, besides, we were all the same species under our radical ’70s costumes. This visual cognition is a cultivated skill that we all use, every day, in simple, one-on-one interactions and at parties, conventions, and business meetings.

It is my contention that each caddis species is, in fact, unique in some way, enough so that, with a little practice, one can tell Brachycentrus americanus from B. lateralis as easily as one can distinguish a donkey from a zebra, or at the very least discern the same degree of difference between a spotted caddis and a dark blue sedge as there is between a moose and a camel. Once you accept that proposition, then the first giant step toward recognition is to acquire a mental image of that which you expect to see.

This is the type of approach that causes entomologists to gasp for air. Any trained taxonomist worthy of his or her reputation will insist that, for the adult stage at least, and short of DNA analysis, only by examining the chemically extended genitalia of a mature (and usually male) insect under a microscope can one accurately determine its species, and to that I will offer no argument. I prefer to draw the following parallel, which is that in high school science classes I learned the difference between laboratory grade chemicals—those with the highest degree of refinement—and industrial grade chemicals, such as those that I once used in the predigital darkroom and which fulfilled their function quite beautifully despite their relative impurity. To the laboratory researcher the smallest contamination in his sample can lead to false results or even disaster. But the most dedicated hatch-matcher, who delights in knowing that his Ceraclea species is flava and not transversa, will suffer little consequence in confusing one with the other. The ability to recognize Ceraclea at all, even without knowing its scientific name, creates a strategic advantage not enjoyed by the angler who lacks it.

In these pages I present a set of annotated caddisfly portraits, the most complete pictorial survey of eastern Trichoptera that I believe has been published to date. Study it well, and discover that identifying caddisflies is easier than you think. Use the information to catch more fish, and have more fun doing it. Then, when the season is over and the earth is covered by a blanket of snow, you can sit by the fire with your children or grandchildren, open the book, and teach them about the world of caddisflies.

001

1

Introduction:

Between Two Extremes

Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.

—Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

The sun was losing its battle against superior clouds and retreating behind the distant hills. The air was sticky, even for late May in Virginia. I was far from home, on a drive south in search of caddisflies that I don’t see in New England, and was hoping for a chance to cast a line during an unfamiliar hatch. The Shenandoah, warm enough to invite Memorial Day holidaymakers for a swim, would not have welcomed trout, even with all the insect larvae that I could see in the streambed. I whacked half-heartedly with my butterfly net at the riverbank shrubs to flush out any caddis adults. A few small squadrons of moths came out to see what all the fuss was about and then dispersed.

After dark I parked the 4-Runner under the Route 211 bridge and set up a 40-watt black light on the hood with a single sheet of watercolor paper as a reflector. The effect was instantaneous and powerful. Within seconds the paper had vanished under a blanket of tiny mayfly spinners. Then the caddisflies appeared. There were Hydropsyche by the hundreds, and almost as many Cheumatopsyche. I recognized the long antennae, white wings, and black ensigns of the elegantly slender Nectopsyche exquisita and the sleek brown form of Oecetis. Stupidly I moved in for a closer look and then I, too, was bathed in the eerie blue glow. Suddenly my skin and clothing were alive with insects. I hastily gathered a few specimens for my camera, unplugged the lamp, and retreated, tires grinding gravel, from the river. It was too late. The caddisflies had found the dome light of my car. I searched for a motel on Interstate 81 through a windshield that was crawling with bugs.

That was the moment when I realized that my fascination with caddisflies had gone far beyond the angler’s curiosity. It was not an unhealthy obsession, mind you, but the kind of goal-oriented yearning felt by collectors of all kinds, whether it be of stamps, baseball cards, souvenir spoons, or straw hats from every province in China. I had arrived at a logical waypoint on a journey. It began when I learned, as thousands of other fly fishers had before me, that caddisflies were at least as important to the eastern angler as mayflies or any other freshwater insect. Fly-fishing writers and systematic entomologists had described them in laborious detail, and still I did not know what many of the most common caddisfly species actually looked like.

In time I began to see them everywhere. They settled around my spotlit front door at night, peered in through my windows, and remained until daybreak. When I arrived at work each day I’d find them there too. Some came right into my studio. Others gathered outside motel rooms, in the beams of my headlights, at the shopping malls, and, most of all, wherever I went fishing for trout or salmon. When winter came, all but the most hardy would be gone.

Some were enormous, but many were almost invisibly small. Some were cloaked in light, almost translucent tans, creams, and grays; earthy brown tones; or darker shades. A few were as black and as shiny as velvet. There were dappled and checkered varieties, and plain ones too. Beyond these superficial differences it was, at first, difficult to tell one from another, but as time passed I began to notice the telltale signs: the shape of the wings, the length and thickness of the antennae, a distinctive posture, or such minutiae as the distribution of spines and spurs on the legs and the configuration of the mouth parts. Recognition became easier. The more I got to know them, the more my apprehension turned to easy familiarity.

Before the snows receded from the banks I went looking for their larvae in clear-running but ice-cold streams. I found many of them in their houses of sticks, stones, or leaf litter, each perfectly suited to its habitat. Others tended their nets and snares from silken retreats or prowled among the rocks in search of prey. A few of the more conspicuous foragers dropped into the substrate as I approached, suggesting an awareness of predators, but in the silence of the New England winter most of the larvae seemed indifferent to the ordeal that lay ahead, when trout and other freshwater fish, warmed into action by the vernal sun, would hunt them down and devour them. I knew then, on these outings, that if I did my homework I could turn that predator-prey relationship between freshwater fish and caddisflies to my own advantage.

That homework became a decade-long project to document, in photographs, the caddisflies that fly fishers in eastern North America imitate with their artificial patterns and their artful presentations. I had, as reference material, all of the great works by LaFontaine, Solomon, Richards, and others on caddisfly imitation, in addition to the standard texts on aquatic insect entomology. All of these rely heavily on line drawings to illustrate their subjects and include only a few, if any, photographs, especially of the adults. Even that great, if not absolutely reliable, modern reference work, the World Wide Web, proved to be an inadequate source of caddisfly images. To a photographer, fly fisher, and amateur aquatic entomologist, the path ahead lay clear.

As I proceeded I discovered that much has changed since many of the books on caddisflies in angling were published, and that my experiences are often contradictory to those of the writers who precede me. The years leading up to 1977, when Larry Solomon and Eric Leiser published The Caddis and the Angler, and Gary LaFontaine began his voluminous research of Caddisflies, were the last of what Solomon describes as the golden years of eastern fly fishing. Mary Dette Clark carries on her family’s fly-tying business in Roscoe, NY, and remembers the days when Solomon and Leiser conducted their studies in the home of, and with the help of, her parents, Walt and Winnie Dette. Clark believes that fishing in the Catskills was just particularly good in the 1970s and optimistically insists that it was part of a natural cycle. The weather was always fine on those days, she told me. It usually only rained during the night. The water was never too high, or too low, there were a lot of bugs, and everybody was catching fish.

There has always been, and always will be, a heated debate among fly fishers about the relative importance of imitation versus presentation in persuading a fish to take a fly. It has never been framed more expressively than in the Rev. George Washington Bethune’s commentary to his 1847 edition of Walton’s Compleat Angler: The advocates of exact imitation speak with artistic contempt of all who differ from them; and are in their turn ridiculed as pedantic pretenders, or mad with too much learning. The truth, like most truths, lies somewhere between the two extremes, and the center of balance shifts according to circumstances. On small streams with low concentrations of insects, good, stealthy presentation is everything, while a larger river erupting with trout during a blanket hatch of grannoms demands exactly the right pattern. There are times that an angler with superb casting skills can compensate for an incomplete knowledge of bugs, but even the most artfully dressed hook cannot overcome the ill effects of a botched presentation. If I go fishing and fail to move a fish, I rarely blame the fly.

The corollary is that if I do catch a fish, it is not merely because of my skill in fly selection or even at fly tying. European anglers, from Halford to the present, provide a clear example of this misguided thinking in giving detailed descriptions of their brown sedge, Anabolia nervosa, but failing to describe the details of their presentation. (On this side of the Atlantic, Anabolia both hatches and lays its eggs away from the water.) Instead they provide exacting patterns, which evidently have met with some success. My dog applies the same sort of logic when barking at the postman. She believes that she is very good at protecting the house because after delivering the mail, the carrier always goes away.

I’ve never had complete confidence in my rod-handling skills, perhaps because I’ve spent so much time with men and women who started fishing when they were old enough to ride their bikes to the local fishin’ hole and who do magical things when they wave their wands. G. E. M. Skues, arguably the most influential angling writer of the early twentieth century, believed in a God-given talent for handling a stick that he called hands, or some quality in some men which seems to make the fly at the end of their line exercise a provocative fascination over trout which the average performer fails to achieve. I count myself among the average variety, and so I figure that my hatch-matching had better be pretty accurate if I am to have any chance at all at catching fish. If, in the pages that follow, I appear to have taken it to an extreme, to be mad with too much learning, it is not as an advocate for one side of the debate, but because I so thoroughly enjoy the process of collecting and sharing information on fly-fishing insects. I believe that to all but the most gifted presentationists the ability to identify the foods fish eat is a vital component of the sport, and one of the most engaging. Given the sheer number of caddis species that live in our eastern lakes and streams, and their incredible adaptations to diverse habitats, investing in an understanding of Trichoptera, of all aquatic insect orders, will also prove the most profitable.

Fig. 1.01. Autumn in the North Country, where brook trout and landlocked salmon take imitations of the egg-laying Rhyacophila fuscula.

The revitalized interest in Trichoptera that occurred in the late 1970s coincided with an upswing in the popularity of fly fishing. The result was an increase in pressure on the resource, in our understanding of the selectivity of trout to the prevailing food forms, and in the need to find new patterns and methods to entice a trout to take the hook. The decade also saw the fulfillment of our national awareness that we needed to clean up our air and water and conserve our natural resources, including wildlife habitat. Anecdotal evidence from fly fishers who have spent many years on a single fishery suggests that there has been a corresponding reduction in the density of our insect hatches. It is a cruel irony that in our attempts to improve the quality of our water resources we may have removed, along with the toxins, many of the nutrients that support aquatic insect life. Tom Rosenbauer came to work at Orvis in Manchester, VT, over thirty years ago and observed a decline in the insects on the Batten Kill when the town’s sewage treatment plant went online. It was like throwing a switch, he told me at an Orvis event not long ago. In a subsequent article on the Batten Kill in the July 2007 edition of Fly Fisherman, Rosenbauer, who studied both entomology and ichthyology in college, expanded upon that idea. It’s scientifically proven that nutrient-rich sewage improves trout-stream productivity as long as water temperatures stay below 70 degrees, he wrote, adding the observation that most caddisflies thrive in water where there is a high nutrient content. Ernest Schwiebert once privately confided that one of his favorite Vermont fishing spots was on Otter Creek where untreated sewage entered from upstream. Solomon, with over forty years on the Beaverkill, wryly notes that a ‘bit’ of effluent may be like putting fertilizer on your garden. That view is supported by biologists like H. B. N. Hynes, who in The Ecology of Running Waters underscores the conclusion that polluted steams, which are, of course, greatly enriched by nutrients, are possibly the areas of highest primary (food) production on the planet.

The cleanup of our inland waters has drawn attention to the more damaging and irreparable long-term effects of the colonial and industrial ages. Even as Theodore Gordon was casting the first American dry flies on the Neversink, a prosperous and growing nation was cutting down its forests for timber. The loss of this old growth canopy exposed the spongelike understory to the desiccating effects of the sun and forever removed the mechanism by which nature stores and releases a steady supply of cool water during the hot, dry summer months. I believe that the reputation of caddisflies as night creatures is, at least in part, the result of the warming of our rivers and streams.

Take a quick survey of the most popular fishing destinations in the East and you will discover an important clue as to why accuracy in caddis imitation has become ever more important. The most viable trout fisheries from Maine south to Georgia and west to the Ozarks, and some of the largest and most diverse caddis populations, are now found below reservoirs that release cold water into the rivers. Thanks to recent improvements in habitat by the Army Corps of Engineers, Tennessee now boasts some of the best fishing for trophy trout east of the Mississippi. Visit the banks of the Farmington River’s West Branch in northeastern Connecticut and you will see numerous caddis species cavorting all day long, even in the heat of late summer. Head just a few miles east to the river’s warmer reaches and the same caddis activity will be pushed into the late evening and early morning hours.

Most books on hatch-matching focus on the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and the West. Even without the tailwaters, I believe that the importance of hatch-matching on southern streams has been historically undervalued. That’s partly because most of the viable trout waters used to be far away from major population centers, but rapid development in the southern Atlantic states has changed all that. It may also be that southerners feel less eager to engage in public discussions about fly-fishing theory and are more inclined to keep their favorite trout waters to themselves. A driving tour through the southern Appalachians reveals that states like Tennessee and North Carolina do not take a back seat when it comes to maintaining and improving their trout fishing resources. The mountain streams of Virginia have some of the best fishing for wild brook trout south of New England. Many caddis genera that favor the southern climate have avoided the attention of northern angler-writers. Many others that are insignificant on northern freestone rivers are quite common on the rich, cool mountain streams of the southern Appalachian highlands.

Beyond recognizing the changing circumstances of the eastern fly fisher over the past quarter century I have had to reconcile the contradictions between my own experiences and those described in the existing literature. I may, over the course of this work, underscore obvious discrepancies, but my general approach is to regard the conclusions drawn by previous authors not as wrong, but only different. My object, then, is to supplement the existing work on caddisflies by teaching anglers how to recognize the most common genera and species and to understand their behavior. Those anglers who wish to learn about more exotic or obscure genera will be able to do that here, too, but the distinction between what is important and what is not must remain clear. Some of the most commonly described adult caddisflies, you will discover, have the least value to fly fishers.

In setting the goals for this project, I calculated that even were I to fish every day of the season for the next ten years, and to visit all of the best known trout waters of the eastern states, it is unlikely that I would have a significant angling experience with each caddis that I managed to photograph. Some of my information is therefore secondhand, filtered through my awareness that not all accounts of caddis behavior and associated angling techniques can be supported. I also determined that to be completely comprehensive on so large a subject was neither possible nor necessary. The likelihood that two anglers fishing the same hatch on distant bodies of water will have identical experiences, or even that they will encounter all of the same hatches over their fly-fishing lifetimes, is quite small. No two habitats are exactly alike, and no two fish populations will give an identical response to a given pattern or technique. Some caddis species are widespread; others are extremely localized. There are, by current estimates, nearly 1,500 of them in North America, in almost every conceivable type of freshwater habitat, limited only by extremes of temperature and chemical content. That’s more caddis species than there are species of mayflies and stoneflies combined. Fortunately, we can ignore many genera that we will never see, because they exist only in muddy seepages, in temporary pools, near hot springs, in frigid climates, or in any number of places where you would never venture to cast a line.

The large number of species also means that no matter how faithfully I recount my own hatch-matching experiences, I cannot confidently predict what kinds of experiences you will have. I can only provide you with information that promotes a favorable outcome. Far more useful, and more fun, than simply committing to memory a catalog of special techniques is developing your own ability to analyze a situation and come up with an appropriate response. The most important hatch is not the one that has been described by so-called experts, but the one that is happening in front of you.

Even with that disclaimer in mind, I’m going to borrow a term from Carl Richards and Bob Braendle by referring to about a dozen eastern caddis genera as superhatches. These are the caddisflies that are so widespread and that appear with such regularity that you stand a good chance of finding one or more of them wherever and whenever you go fishing, as long as there are leaves on the trees. They have the added advantage of being relatively easy to identify. On the opposite extreme, I am also including a number of genera that haven’t yet appeared in fly-fishing books. Several of these will also be easy to identify. I find them every season in my backyard, and imagine that you might find them in yours too. Should you come across a situation of selective feeding to an unusual, perhaps highly localized, caddis hatch (as I did one evening when big brook trout were ignoring the Hexagenia hatch in favor a small caddisfly that I bet you’ve never heard of), I want you to be able to find some information on it, or on a related species, here.

I’ve spent many hours looking at caddisflies under a microscope with a stack of reference texts at hand, but I confess that when it comes right down to it I find the job of identifying caddisflies according to diagnostic keys to be tedious and difficult. Perhaps it is because I have no formal training in the process. More likely, it’s just that I am too impatient, and would rather be fishing. Either way, it’s a deficiency that I share with the vast majority of fly rodders. It’s not much help, for example, to know that a certain caddis family has a trio of ocelli if you don’t know what an ocellus is, or what it looks like. With practice I’ve cleared that and other similar hurdles, but when I go fishing I would no more carry a microscope with me for streamside identification than I would tote a dictionary for assistance with day-to-day conversation.

I can, however, employ a net, a small and in-expensive magnifying loupe, and a faculty with which most of us are blessed, which is visual memory. Given my personal set of acquired skills, I can also share that visual information with other anglers and naturalists. To accomplish that task, I set out to photograph every eastern caddis species that I could locate near a trout stream, and then to identify each of my specimens to at least the generic and, if possible, specific level. In some cases I have succeeded in using the available keys to make my identification. In the interest of scientific accuracy, however, I have more often sent my samples, along with a picture of the live insect, to one of a number of trained professionals. None of them, I hasten to add, would have agreed to pronounce a finding based solely on a photograph. Nonetheless, that is exactly what I am asking you to do.

Another thing I will ask you to do is to leave taxonomy to the taxonomists. They are extremely good at what they do, and their enthusiasm as they flip through their reference works and return to the microscope like a detective following a hot lead can be contagious. I learned, however, that they rarely get to study an adult insect that is not already pinned or pickled. Much of the information about caddisfly behavior that is most useful to the angler has not come from biologists, but from the observations of other anglers. It was Larry Solomon who taught us to separate adult caddisflies into groups according to egg-laying and emergence behavior. It was Gary LaFontaine who showed us, among so many things, how a pupa behaves as it rises to the surface of a stream. And it was photographer/anglers like Carl Richards, Jim Schollmeyer, and Ted Fauceglia who established the standard of photographing living insects.

Even if you can only identify a caddis to the family level, you will have solved most of the puzzle of what fly to offer, and in what manner. Larval behavior, emergence, and egg-laying among species of a single family are, as a rule, consistent, although details like case structure and time of emergence do change. Choosing the right fly, as LaFontaine demonstrated in Caddisflies, becomes a simple matter of matching the size and the color scheme in a pattern that is mechanically engineered to suit the method of presentation, which in turn is intended to match the behavior of the insect. If you factor all of the color possibilities and all of the insect sizes with all of the behavioral types you come up with a frightening number, but fortunately it doesn’t work that way. Most color schemes and even sizes apply to only a few presentation methods. That’s what makes a systematic approach like LaFontaine’s so effective.

Anyone who has wrestled with the subject of fly fishing entomology understands that we can tame it, but we can never really be its master or take it out of the wild. We may poke at it with a chair, and make it perform all kinds of tricks, but sooner or later it will snarl at us and slap at us with sharpened claws. Writing about hatch-matching—like forecasting the weather—is an attempt to predict that which is often unpredictable. We will never lack for critics who point out when we are wrong.

There are other obstacles to maneuver around, including a herd of sacred cows. They become sacred when they appear in print so often that we are inclined to believe them regardless of their basis in fact. Fishing writers are too often like politicians who persistently repeat their unsubstantiated conjecture until it takes on the patina of truth. We are also notorious for copying other writers’ homework and passing it in as our own, again without first checking the facts. I hope it can be said that there is none of that here. Nor will I offer you any paper flies, designs that look tempting in the vise but have never actually pierced the lip of a fish. I am committed to making a clear distinction between personal experience and information obtained from other sources, to questioning everything, and to testing the efficacy of the recommended patterns.

Fig. 1.02. The dam at First Connecticut Lake, Coos Co., NH. Coldwater releases from lakes and reservoirs offer a return to conditions that existed before intensive logging and development raised the temperatures of our rivers and streams.

One more hurdle is that of language. The danger of basing so much of my research on scientific texts is that I too often find myself thinking in scientific terms. There is nothing wrong with that unless you are writing, as in the present work, for nonscientists. Heeding the warning of Datus Proper that when you get close to an insect, the danger is that it will become as interesting as the fish, I have made constant and repeated efforts to pull myself back from the brink. Nevertheless, I am going to force-feed you a generous portion of caddisfly biology, with the promise that once you have digested it you will come to appreciate how much it nourishes your enjoyment of fly fishing.

The heart of this book, and what makes it unique, is the collection of photographs. In order for them to be useful, you will have to do some homework of your own. It will include developing the habit of catching specimens from the drift, from the bushes, or from the air and eliminating any guesswork. There are no easy shortcuts, and no free passes. My job has been to collect all of the applicable information in one place. Of the four chapters that precede the catalog of insects, two are absolute prerequisites. The first is a lesson on caddisfly biology. It explains many of the details about behavior and anatomy that help fly fishers in choosing an appropriate pattern and presentation; it concludes with an annotated list and associated diagrams of the identifying physical features of each life stage. Just as important, it explains how biologists have separated and arranged the various caddisfly families according to the way they adapt to ecological niches. Understanding taxonomic relationships is a key to understanding behavior and anatomy.

The second prerequisite is a study of caddisfly habitat. Understanding the role of caddisflies in stream and still-water ecosystems is yet another tool in predicting what insects you will find in what kinds of places, and how and where fish feed on them. In fishing terms, this is called reading the water. I’ve done my best to make both of these chapters relevant and palatable.

Chapters 2 and 5 are strictly for fly fishers. The first is a brief history of the role of caddisfly imitations in North American angling. It necessarily includes a chronological, although by no means complete, survey of books written on the subject, dating back to the sixteenth-century Treatise. The last of the introductory chapters offers my personal prejudices and informed choices on the tackle and techniques that pertain to imitating caddisflies.

Along with the photographs you will find physical descriptions, including color schemes and corresponding hook sizes, of most of the adult caddisflies that you are likely to encounter on an eastern trout stream, and of a few that only the most observant will ever notice. I’ve included many photographs of larvae, emphasizing those that are actually available to foraging fish. Where possible I’ve presented pictures of mature pupae, the pharate adults, but I confess to having developed a distaste for taking them because it is fatal to the insect if not perfectly timed, and because color and size information are easily derived from a freshly hatched adult. Some of these caddisflies will be identical or similar to species that are found in the West. You will also find descriptions of the insect’s behavior in each of the life stages that are available to anglers, and a list of recommended pattern designs.

For easy reference, I’ve built two charts that appear in the appendices. The first is a hatch chart for the East, divided into three geophysical regions: North, South, and Chesapeake watershed. The second summarizes both habitat and behavior by type for each genus discussed in the four insect chapters. The appendices follow the list of all patterns that are discussed in the text, pictured and with recipes and comments, arranged by type. By collating the information of all three with the insect descriptions and photographs, you can maximize your chances of catching fish wherever they feed on caddisflies.

2

Caddisflies and the American Angling Tradition

Literature stops in 1100. After that it’s only books.

—J. R. R. Tolkien

The modern history of caddis imitation in American fly fishing began on a bright May day in Roscoe, NY, in the fly shop of Walt and Winnie Dette. Larry Solomon, not yet thirty, had met Ernie Maltz the year before while salmon fishing on the Miramichi. As the two men renewed their acquaintance the talk turned to hatch-matching, and then to caddisflies, a subject to which Solomon, like most trout fishers of his day, had given only passing consideration.

Ernie Maltz was one of the best all-around anglers that I ever saw, Solomon told me decades later. When I first met him in 1967, he had a box of about twelve to fourteen different caddis imitations. He was the only one I knew that had more than one or two. He made me aware of the importance of caddis and stimulated my desire to learn more. The result, says Solomon, was The Caddis and the Angler, the first book for fly fishermen devoted entirely to the role of caddisflies.

Caddis imitation did not begin with The Caddis and the Angler, nor even with Leonard Wright’s Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect, a treatise inspired by that author’s frustration during a voluminous hatch of the dark blue sedge. Throughout the sport’s history, fly fishers who are serious about matching feather, fur, and steel imitations to natural aquatic insects have understood that caddisflies, as they are known on this side of the Atlantic, or sedge flies, as the English prefer to call them, are one of the most important trout foods in any freshwater environment. There has been a tendency, however, to regard the history of hatch-matching in the United States since the ascendancy of the dry fly as essentially linear, and to conclude that no widespread interest in imitating caddisflies occurred until late in the twentieth century. What is certain is only that the first American angling entomologists were completely preoccupied with the more colorful, predictable, and tragically short-lived mayflies. Caddisflies, they argued, were creatures of the night and therefore of little value. A more likely motive behind the deprecation of Trichoptera, besides getting home in time for dinner, was that the authors of these early works on hatch-matching were purists of the upstream, dead-drift, dry-fly tradition who simply did not know what to do with an insect that rarely lingers on the water’s surface and, when it does, won’t stay still.

To put caddis imitation in its true historical perspective we must journey back to the ostensible beginning of fly fishing’s recorded history, The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, that appeared in or around 1496. It listed a set of a dozen imitations, with ingredients but without illustration or tying instructions, known forever after as the XII. In an effort to reconstruct the patterns, and to determine their appropriate hook sizes, historian and editor John McDonald, an American, collated the analysis of two learned English angling writers, John Waller Hills and G. E. M. Skues, to match each artificial with a natural insect. He concluded that at least three of the Treatise flies, the Black Leaper, the Dun Cut, and the Shell Fly, were intended as imitations of caddisflies, and that as few as four, and at most seven, were designed to match what we now call mayflies. None of the XII, it is worth noting, had a tail, the lack of which separates caddisflies from both mayflies and stoneflies.

Fig. 2.01. Torrey Collins on the Neversink River, where Preston Jennings conducted much of his research on trout stream insects.

The set from the Treatise endured as the standard artillery for the next two centuries. Even with the advances that followed, in fly-tying tools and in the design and manufacture of hooks, rods, lines, and reels, the essential components of fly design and presentation would remain unchanged from the age of Columbus through the industrial revolution, a period of almost 400 years. It is clear that pre-Victorian fly fishers created their patterns to imitate insects known to inhabit their unspoiled trout waters. I am not convinced that they fully understood the insect behavior that caused their methods to succeed. It is enough that they were successful, and were satisfied.

The modern age of hatch-matching declared its arrival in England with the 1836 publication of Alfred Ronalds’s Fly Fisher’s Entomology, the first fully illustrated book to couple fly patterns with specific natural insects, using both their common and scientific names. Of the fifty insects in the illustrated list, only twenty are mayfly duns or spinners, seven are true flies, and four each are stoneflies and caddisflies. The rest are evenly distributed among beetles, caterpillars, ants and wasps, crickets, and other insect orders, both aquatic and terrestrial. The imitations were all wet flies. Ronalds was by no measure the first advocate of specific imitation, but the pages of his Entomology reflect both the collected angling wisdom and the most successful patterns of his day, and cemented the union of art and science that makes fly fishing such an appealing pastime.

It was the author of the second great work on fly-fishing entomology who would have the greatest impact on fly-fishing methods, and the most deleterious effect on the role of caddisflies in American angling, through most of the twentieth century. Frederick Halford published his Dry Fly Entomology in 1897. His previous work, Floating Flies and How to Dress Them, had sparked intense debate on the chalk-streams of southern England and in the London clubs. It had also caught the attention of American anglers who were eager to catch the newly established, and rather finicky, residents of their New World streams, the brown trout imported from both England and Germany. The essence of Halford’s message was that the proper way to catch a trout was to cast a fly, constructed so as to remain floating on the surface, upstream and allow it to drift serenely toward a rising fish. The first of the new dry flies to arrive in the United States was a set of Halford’s own, sent to his correspondent, Theodore Gordon, then residing in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Using them as models, Gordon quickly developed his own set of patterns better suited to the swift and turbulent rivers of the Northeast than to the placid English chalk-streams. Others soon took up the call, and within a very few years the famous Catskill dry flies, which include such enduring standards as the Quill Gordon, Light Cahill, Hendrickson, and Red Quill, were tied to the tippet of every gentleman angler in the region.

If the ascension of the Catskills dry fly were the whole story of fly fishing in early-twentieth-century America, then it would be easy to imagine a generation of anglers for whom it was unthinkable that they could imitate anything other than a mayfly in the act of taking wing. In fact, a closer inspection of the literary record indicates that the arrival of the dry fly in the United States, along with its set of rules about how to use them, only served to stratify American angling, as it has in Europe, partly according to class but also as a result of geographic separation. Even among the educated elite who were most likely to adhere to British traditions the idea that there was only one sporting method of catching a trout had its share of antagonists. They took their cue from Skues—the Englishman considered by many to be the father of the artificial nymph—who engaged in a legendary joust with the Halfordians, against whom he was vastly outnumbered but ultimately triumphant. Edward R. Hewitt, on this side of the Atlantic, trumpeted his own experiments, both with larval imitations and with skated dry flies, to an enthusiastic but fickle audience.

Both hatch-matching and caddis imitation were concepts familiar to American anglers long before the ascent of the dry fly. Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, Teddy’s uncle and a popular outdoor writer of his day, wrote the first book to address the role of entomology in American fishing, Game Fish of the Northern States of America and British Provinces, in 1860. Sara McBride, the daughter of a fishing guide in upstate New York and, according to writer and historian Paul Schullery, one of the most respected fly tiers of the 1870s published a number of essays on entomology for fly fishers that emphasized the importance of caddisflies, or Phyganina. She wrote, however, for an audience that fished primarily for the less discriminating brook trout and that did not feel the need for specific imitation. Her last article appeared in 1881, two years before the first introduction of the brown trout in the United States.

One can hardly fault the Catskills anglers for using imported, European methods to catch imported, European fish, but their zealous devotion to the dry fly would come at a price. The first book written on the subject of fly-fishing insects specific to North America, and again using their accepted scientific and common names, was A Book of Trout Flies, by Preston Jennings. With the aid of leading entomologists, Jennings identified the major trout stream insects and matched them with the most popular Catskills patterns of the day, including a few of his own. With very few exceptions, all of the insects were mayflies, a bias that did not pass unnoticed by contemporary reviewers. It suggests, however, that by the time the book appeared in 1935, many American fly fishers were in complete lockstep with the upstream, dry-fly method, in which the caddis had no place, and immature insects of any kind had no value. Jennings perpetuated the idea that most caddis hatched out when the light is usually so poor that it is difficult or impossible to see a dry fly on the water. As for the possibility of imitating the vast number of larvae and pupae that trout consume under the surface, Jennings was equally dismissive. The fly fisher is most interested in a fish that is either surface feeding or one that can be induced to surface feed, he wrote, and a fish grubbing around the bottom looking for caddis worms is a poor prospect for him.

Jennings did describe three caddis genera, Brachycentrus, Stenophylax (now Pycnopsyche), and Psilotreta, and even coined the nickname for the latter, the dark