February Red - yesterday and today

February Red - yesterday and today

 Author: Wojciech Węglarski

I recently signaled about the twisted fate of an old Irish (or is it British?) midge meant to mimic the small foragers swarming in the pre-spring February-April period. As early as the 1930s, its design was featured in British company catalogs (e.g. Hardy Bros Ltd.).

I guess, based on this basis, in the Company Standard of the Work Cooperative of Sport Fishing Equipment in Krakow, mentioned by me more than once, there was a description of a fly called February Fly - I give in extenso:

„Abalone - beetroot wool".

Wing - spotted partridge tail, or pheasant tail

Blackberry - gray, dark rooster

Hook size - 8-12”

One would like to exclaim: But it's almost March Brown and Claret, (or if you prefer - Claret March Brown). However, this will be discussed a little later.

Images of this „cooperative” bow tie are shown below.

On the other hand, the recipe for this wet fly in J. Veniard's famous and reliable „Fly Dressers’ Guide, 1968” goes like this:

Torso - from the back: 2/3 mohair reddish claret, 1/3 light brown

Blackberry - rooster, dark grizzly

Wings - pheasant hen fly

Its appearance is shown in the photo below.

Still sticking to British sources as the most reliable, it is impossible not to quote J.Buckland's opinion in his „The Pocket Guide to Trout & Salmon Flies, 1988”, where he places a note next to the image of the wet February Red, that it is an Irish fly, once called Red Fly or Old Joan, that it refers to the historical (1496 !) Dun Fly, well, and that it is very similar to the well-known wet Partridge and Orange. A not very clear illustration indicates that it is a design referring to the recipe in Veniard.

      I recently fell into the hands of a fairly thorough book study entitled. „A Guide to River Trout Flies” by J. Roberts , 1995. Although numerous photographs of flies show their often nightmarishly sloppy execution, for all descriptions are comprehensive and accurate, hence the conclusion that it is worthwhile, however, to rely on these compiled news. I was interested in the fate of February Red. And what does Mr. Roberts write? Well, he rightly places it in a separate group of forkheads and accurately distinguishes between dry and wet renditions of this fly. Leaving aside superfluous details about company names and coded hook symbols, I give strict fly recipes.

Let's start with the dry version:

Hook - #14, (but it would have been better to specify the size number of the fly - I wrote about this more extensively on another occasion)

Leading thread - dark orange, (As if the color of this tiny fly's head would matter so much!)

Thorax - red brown seal (substitute)

Wings - the tips of the grizzly rooster's feathers, laid flat along the torso

Blackberry - brown or grizzly, rooster

Its wet version, on the other hand, is:

Hook - #12 - 16, (but it would have been better to specify the size number of the fly - I wrote about this more extensively on another occasion)

Leading thread - dark orange, (As if the color of this tiny fly's head would matter so much!)

Thorax - thin scrolls of brown seal (substitute), a mixture of claret+brown

Wrap - thread, dark brown

Blackberry - elephant in 1/3 distance from the mesh, (my note: this is a tiny feather from the top of the woodcock's wing)

I have included images of both versions of this bow tie below.

      So that, in a nutshell, is the case with this fly, but why is it that nowadays flies with a slightly different appearance than previously described appear under the name February Red, which I give expression to in my book on making artificial flies, (wet - item 72, dry - item 270)? To tell the truth, I don't know. But what I do know is that this midge is very reminiscent of the March Brown and Claret, and experienced midge-mates, knowing very well that trout somehow particularly prefer claret coloration, successfully and often use such flies during their trout fishing expeditions. That's the whole secret of the popularity of the „modern” February Red. Incidentally, is the exceptional fishability of the previously described Hofland's Fancy, (the historical version containing this lurid „claret”), a coincidence?

For the record, below I show the „current” dry and wet versions of this fly.

    Of course, as is usually the case, there appeared and appears a multitude of different flies, (mostly wet), with this magical coloration of the trunk or just the scutellum. Many of them already have their „time-honored” names, but also many names of new designs, not necessarily with the magic „claret”, are the fruit of the ingenuity of their „inventors” - names that are often bizarre, or simply nonsensical and miraculous. So I am often overwhelmed by empty laughter when reading these pseudo-English nonsense inventions. You'll ask, where can you find this stuff? Well, both in fly fishing galleries and shopping portals - that I will not mention one and the other by name. Anyway, look for yourself and laugh about it yourself, too. But now we have such times that, for example, we no longer have an entrepreneur, but a developer, and a department store, it has already been nicknamed a market - and so one could cite similar examples ad infinitum. Even the statements of kindergarten children are already teeming with nonsense terms - for example, that something there was „supel” or „mega” ! What a poverty of expression of thought! Such is the language we have lived to see nowadays, but is this cosmopolitan-corporate gibberish to drive our beautiful speech out of existence?

Other publications by the author:

Flytying in practice / A little about the names of flies....

History flytying / Polish names of flies

History flytying / Hofland's Fancy - flytying-legend, flytying-nestor