Matching the Hatch: A Practical Guide to Imitation of Insects Found on Eastern and Western Trout Waters

Matching the Hatch

A practical guide to imitation of insects found on eastern & western trout waters

Written and illustrated by Ernest G. Schwiebert

Foreword by James Prosek

Revised edition

Scott & Nix, Inc.

New York

Text and illustrations copyright © by the estate of Ernest G. Schwiebert, Jr. and Scott & Nix, Inc.

Foreword © by James Prosek

All rights reserved.

First revised edition 2011

Scott & Nix, Inc.

150 West 28th Street, Suite 1103

New York, NY 10001-6103

www.scottandnix.com

ISBN (HARDCOVER): 978-0-9799037-8-6

ISBN (PDF): 978-1-935622-22-2

ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-935622-23-9

ISBN (KINDLE): 978-1-935622-24-6

Cover images: Ephemerella x dun (male) photograph by John Miller (top); Red Quill tied by Eric Austin, photograph by Charles Nix (bottom)

This volume is dedicated to my father,

Dr. Ernest G. Schwiebert,

who presented a trout-fishing outfit

to me on my seventh birthday;

and to all the other men

with whom I have fished

and loved the great trout streams

of our country.

Contents

Foreword by James Prosek

Author’s note

The evolution of fly-fishing

The trout and his habits

The principal stream insects

Eastern mayflies: early season

Eastern mayflies: spring season

Eastern mayflies: summer season

Western mayflies: early hatches

Western mayflies: late season

Caddisflies and stoneflies

The lesser trout foods

The stream diary

On ethics and philosophy astream

Afterword by Frank E. Klune, Jr.

Appendix: Hatching charts and fly patterns

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

At about 9- or 10-years-old, I was stung and stunned by a beautiful fish called a brook trout. It hit me so joyously hard in the heart that painting trout in watercolors consumed my life for the next twenty years. Rapt by the passion for stalking small brook trout in diminutive streams with a fly rod, I devoured anything I could find on the subject. Then, when I was 14-years-old, I stumbled on the work of Ernest Schwiebert, his two-volume Trout in particular.

Schwiebert was a true romantic and his writings appealed to my deepest yearnings as a young angler. He had traveled around the world catching trout—how, I wondered, did he manage to carve out such an amazing life? He had also written about catching brook trout in the small streams where he grew up fishing. In true Ernie style, he called my beloved brook trout the Aphrodite of the hemlocks.

As a young boy, I dropped many hints to my father and stepmother that there was nothing I’d rather have than a set of Schwiebert’s Trout. One day we were in a shop in Bedford, New York—the Bedford Sportsman, I think—and I spotted in a glass case a set of books bound in maroon cloth with silver embossed letters spelling Trout. At some point in the next few weeks my parents went back to the shop and bought the slip-cased set for $125, which was a lot on my father’s schoolteacher salary. They wrapped the books neatly and put them under the Christmas tree.

Two weeks before Christmas, I shook the heavy package, hefted it and turned it, and pronounced, "It’s Schwiebert’s two-volume Trout! My parents said it wasn’t, but I knew it was, and I saw in their faces that they were much dismayed that I’d figured it out. When it came time to open presents, I carefully pulled apart the outer gift-wrapping and the books had been wrapped in newspaper. So sharpened were my senses with excitement, I even examined the newspaper inside the package and saw that the date was December 23. I realized that at some time after I shook the package and guessed the contents, my parents had re-wrapped it. Not even looking underneath the paper to see the two bricks my parents put inside to trick me, I demanded, Where are they?" Reluctantly, my stepmother went to get my true gift from the closet in the other room. I poured over these books for years and I still have them on my bookshelf as a reminder of my budding passion for trout, fishing, and books.

In my teens I stalked the man himself in booths at fly-fishing shows and got his autograph in his square architectural hand. And years later when I published my first book about trout as an undergraduate at college, I received a beautiful letter from him and had the pleasure of getting to know him. A few times he drove from Princeton to art openings of mine in Manhattan and told stories of his travels over dinner. Ernie was larger than life for me, a childhood hero of sorts, and part of an angling history that stretched back to Izaak Walton. He had fished and cultivated friendships with angling greats, who honed their techniques on the spring-fed streams of central Pennsylvania—Charles Fox and Vincent Marinaro in particular.

My words here are intended as a celebration of this new edition of Schwiebert’s first work, published when he was only 23-years-old and an architecture student at Ohio State University. The book went through many printings in its first years and gave him a following in a world he loved. His career as an urban planner and institutional architect gave him opportunities to travel, and he always figured out ways to make time for fishing on those ventures.

Ernie loved trout, yes, but more so I think he loved the various stages of aquatic insects that trout ate. Through an artist’s eye, he saw the beauty of nature’s architecture—the homes the caddisflies built for themselves and the squared overlapping plates of a stonefly’s exoskeleton—and drew them as if following original plans drafted by a greater power. Clearly, he also loved angling, and this little book, instructive and passionately wrought, is a tribute to that passion.

Recently, I was on Spruce Creek in central Pennsylvania, and spent time with a local named Dave McMullen who has fly-fished the state’s spring creeks his whole life. He’d had a chance to fish with Ernie several times. He said he’d been given a copy of Matching the Hatch when he was eleven, shortly after it came out. Dave said the book was a revelation. You’ve got to understand, McMullen said, this was before fly-fishing was an industry. There were no fly shops. You couldn’t go to a shop and buy a rooster neck, you went to the farm and chased one down and killed it. He described Ernie’s meticulous fly recipes as opening a secret world. Previous books might describe the body of a Hendrickson as simply brown or pink. Ernie was specific—it had to be the pinkish urine-burned fur from a fox’s belly. When that book came out every fox in Mifflin County was in trouble.

Sadly, I never spent a day on the water with Ernie. But any time I read his words, in this highly original volume, and in others, I’m there, at the next pool or riffle, with Ernie’s encouragement, insights, and unflagging way of getting to the heart of the matter: the moment when the trout sees the fly and instinct takes over.

—JAMES PROSEK

2011

Author’s note

This book is not entirely a product of my own effort, for I am deeply indebted to many men for the generous help that has been given to me ever since I began the wonderful pastime of fly-fishing for trout. In recalling that assistance, I remember names that cannot be ignored or forgotten.

Mention must be made of my father, Dr. Ernest G. Schwiebert, an historian whose love of trout fishing has been passed on to and carefully nurtured in his son. We still fish together, and without his constant prodding this book might never have been written.

Gratitude must be expressed to Bill Blades, author of Fishing Flies and Fly Tying, who started me out properly on that wonderful facet of trout fishing that is fly-tying; to Frank Steel, author of several books on fishing and holder of the first perfect score in the dry-fly accuracy event, for taking most of the kinks out of my casting when I was only twelve; to Dr. E.T. Bodenberg of Wittenberg College, who aided me in the identification of the insects collected; to Frank Klune, well-known Colorado angler, who helped to collect many western species and gave much valuable criticism; to Jeff Norton, a close angling friend, who gave unfailingly of his time and advice in the preparation of the manuscript; and to the many good friends who fished new flies and offered suggestions in the search for consistently effective patterns.

Many trout fishermen are not too much interested by trout-stream insects. They merely want to get away for a few hours on some stream and catch a few fish. Too often, a few fish is exactly what they catch with such a haphazard approach to trout fishing.

This book was written for the trout fisherman who knows something about the game and is unhappy with his results much of the time. These pages offer refinements to the man who has mastered the fundamentals. Large trout are large only because they have eluded all the natural and man-made hazards that plague them. One must know more than the fish if he wishes to take trout.

I am only an amateur entomologist whose insect knowledge is a by-product of the pursuit of trout. This is not a complete guide to all of our important aquatic insects. It will be many years before all of our leading hatches, like those of the British rivers, have been classified and successfully imitated.

The character of our trout water changes west of the Great Plains, and that portion of our country is treated as western trout country. Eastern waters are those lying east of the Rockies.

Ours is the grandest sport. It is an intriguing battle of wits between the angler and the trout; and in addition to appreciating the tradition and grace of the game, we play it in the magnificent out-of-doors.

—ERNEST G. SCHWIEBERT, JR.

1955

Note to the revised edition

The family of Ernest Schwiebert could not be more thrilled with this new 21st Century edition of Matching the Hatch. My father published this book while he was an undergraduate at The Ohio State University. At that time in his life, fly-fishing was a passion but only a hobby. He was studying to become an architect. Architecture was his primary vocation for nearly twenty years. His mastery of this craft can be seen in his drawings of insects in various stages of their life cycle and of fish and other objects of nature. These drawings are featured in this new edition as they should be.

However, if architecture had not become his vocation, I am pretty certain that biology would have been. And, hence, the understanding of trout and salmon biology and of the biology of the insects that these fish pursue. This knowledge accumulated as a young man is articulated here. Interestingly though, the same principles ring true today.

Although this might come as a surprise, my father spent more time watching the fish he pursued and in the practice of collecting insects from the surface film, under rocks, from the bank foliage, and from the air than he did actually fishing. He taught me to appreciate this fine art of watching as well as doing. He also had an incredible feel for the watersheds that he fished throughout the world—he cherished each and remembered each through a sixth sense for these natural surroundings and with a photographic memory for these places.

Late in life, my father continued to document important biological observations and discussed them with me often because I did choose biology as my vocation and I could act as a sounding board for what he was hypothesizing. He wanted to share them in this new edition of this book but did not get to do so. First, he was struggling with the new revolution of genetics and the ability to re-classify insects based upon genetic code. He was not fully comfortable with the changes in Latin names that were occurring frequently. We did agree that, although genetically identical and classified as the same species, that insects were also among the most susceptible creatures to changes and/or differences to their aquatic environment or surrounding habitat. We agreed that the pH, fertility, water quality (e.g., degree of pollution, limestone spring creek versus cedar creek versus mountain stream or lake), altitude, and climate might all impact the appearance or phenotype of a mayfly or a caddisfly or a stonefly. The same species might be of different size or color due to these environmental factors. Such factorts begin to explain the concept of epigenetics, genetics affected by environmental influences. By the same token, insects may be among the most susceptible to climate change. My father noticed on his favorite Eastern watersheds that hatches were coming earlier because it was becoming warmer earlier. He intended to amend the Hatch Tables in the Appendix of this new edition to reflect that opinion. He also suspected that when a particular Spring, Summer or Fall had temperatures out of the ordinary or if there was a string of unusual weather not normally seen at that time that some hatches failed to materialize at all or as well as in the past year.

The take home message for the fly-fisherman is to develop your own sixth sense or feel or instincts for your favorite fisheries, tie flies to imitate what you collect from the screen door when you leave the porch light on to see what hatched that evening, and appreciate that the watershed has its own ecosystem that changes the fish and insects and other creatures that live within it. And, appreciate and protect all of the above for future generations.

—ERIK M. SCHWIEBERT, Ph.D.

2011

The first edition of Matching the Hatch was published in 1955 and included forty-five black-and-white drawings and four color plates of various mayfly illustrations. For this newly revised edition, we worked with the Schwiebert family and gained access to the original art created for the book along with illustrations from Schwiebert’s other books. Four-color art of trout, nymphs, duns, and spinners are now included throughout Matching the Hatch. In all, 200 illustrations accompany his text and are now reproduced with fidelity to the original artwork. Other than updates to the scientifc names of various groups of insects, the text remains as it was published fifty-six years ago. It retains every bit of the wonder, excitement, curiousity, and love of learning and fishing that made Schwiebert such an important figure in the history of the sport.

—SCOTT & NIX, Inc.

2011

The evolution of flyfishing

The artificial fly is quite ancient as a means of fooling trout, for as early as the third century anglers were using flies on the unsuspecting trout of Macedonia. The philosopher Aelian tells us in his De Natura Animalium that a fly of wool and hackles was fished effectively on the Astraeus, and that these crude flies were an attempt at matching the hatch.

We know relatively little about the sport of angling in the long years after Aelian, but in 1496, just four years after an historical voyage by one Christopher Columbus, there came from Winchester, England, a treatise on trout flies. Dame Juliana Berners described methods of fly-dressing and fly-fishing in her surprisingly thorough Treatyse of Fysshynge Wyth an Angle. Some of those historic patterns are still used today.

In 1653, at the mellow age of sixty years, Izaak Walton published his famous Rich, Marriot edition of The Compleat Angler and endeared himself forever to the angling fraternity. This little volume is not just a discourse on fishing methods. It expresses a philosophy of life as well. We know little of Walton’s education, but the stature of his angling friends in the intellectual climate of his day indicates that his education must have been adequate, regardless of its nature.

Such men as Sir Henry Wotton, who was an ambassador, scholar, poet and Provost of Eton; John Donne, the well-known poet and preacher, who had no little influence on the thinking of his time; Michael Drayton, who was beloved as England’s river poet; and John Hales, scholar and fellow of Eton, were his companions on the stream.

These men fished the quiet British rivers with the long rods and horsehair lines described by Aelian centuries earlier, and it appears that only minor improvements had been made in the tackle used.

In the fifth edition of The Compleat Angler, which appeared in 1676, we meet Charles Cotton, who contributed a treatise devoted to the artificial fly and its use. With this work, he firmly established himself as the father of the sport. Although Walton was thirty-seven years his senior, the esteem that these two men had for each other was apparently great. We have tangible evidence of it in their initials over the door of the fishing house along Cotton’s trout water in Derbyshire. Cotton was a man of some means, and was later to achieve a reputation as a traveler, scholar, soldier and poet. The little fishing house on the Dove, with its inscription Piscatoribus sacrum, is preserved today much as it was in 1674. It stands as a shrine for anglers and has stood through the centuries as visible evidence of the brotherhood existing between them.

Walton and his friends lived in troubled times, for England was torn by war between the Roundheads and the Royalists. Yet the tranquility of the words of Walton gives little hint of the strife. Behind those words is a relaxed spirit born on the quiet pools of his rivers.

Some centuries later, in 1836, we find the serious study of insects creeping into angling, with Alfred Ronalds’ classic The Fly Fisher’s Entomology. It was a book of insects and their imitations, written for the swift rivers in the north of England.

Four years later, John Younger contributed River Angling to