The Bird’s Nest, Spectral Version

Trout flies have captivated me since I was a kid. I can’t explain that and feel no need to defend it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and art is its own justification. So I’ll just say it: at the top of my “Fascinating Flies” list is a thing of singular beauty called a Bird’s Nest. To me, it’s the coolest-looking trout fly out there. A couple of years ago, I decided to find out everything I could about this fly and learn to tie and to fish it — not necessarily in that order. Here is what happened.

First Impression

The first Bird’s Nest I ever saw was in a photograph at the top of a recipe for the fly — just a materials list and tying steps. I was barely beginning to tie back then, and nothing I saw there made sense. The vocabulary was foreign, and the fly looked like a dubious conglomeration of feathers bursting out backward from a blob of hair. But for some reason, I clipped the page from the magazine it was in and filed it away. I clearly remember that page, but have no idea what became of it. For some reason, the Bird’s Nest just intrigued me.

Meeting Ralph Cutter

The next turn in the story hinges on my high esteem for Ralph Cutter. I knew about him, had read articles by him in this magazine, and one day, as my brother and I drifted the lower Yuba, I recognized him and his wife, Lisa, in a nearby boat. At the takeout, we introduced ourselves. Ralph and Lisa were both such pleasant people and easy to talk to. Naturally, I kept reading their articles, and a few years later, I read Ralph’s fine book Fish Food. There, I found a striking number of references to the

Bird’s Nest. Here’s one: “If I were forced to fish a single fly all season it would certainly be a #12 dark gray nymph. Any nymph would work but since I am partial to the Bird’s Nest, that’s the nymph I would use.” This, along with several other affirmations of loyalty throughout the book, persuaded me: “If Ralph Cutter thinks it’s good,” I thought, “it most likely is.” I had to find out how to tie the Bird’s Nest.

The only help I could get was online. I watched closely every video I could find there. Consequently, I can save you some time and trouble. The best of the bunch is Hans Weilenmann’s video. It’s like watching a pro golfer make an impossibly long putt. You can hardly believe your eyes, but you have to. Hans makes it look easier and faster than it really is, but significantly, his video showed me what I could not imagine — how actually to tie the fly well.

Weilenmann’s Way

Weilenmann ties a well-constructed, well-proportioned, superlative Bird’s Nest, giving the fly an unrivaled flowing look. With a backpacking trip for golden trout coming up, and reasoning that the higher altitude called for smaller flies, I used what I had on hand to tie (rather poorly) three size 14 Bird’s Nests Weilenmann’s way (except for using preblended commercial Hare’s Ear dubbing) and took them to a lake at eleven thousand feet in elevation. Suffice it to say that I thought of changing the fly’s name to “Hail Mary,” because first forgotten, then remembered, and cast in final desperation, it worked, to my absolute astonishment. I really needed only one. With my interest in the pattern deepened and seeking to understand why this fly had distinguished itself in my own experience, I returned to Fish Food and read more carefully.

More Clues from Cutter

Fish Food should be in every fly fisher’s library and consulted often. As a primer on fishing the Bird’s Nest, in twelve different references, the book accounts for this fly’s usefulness in terms of movement, shape, color, imitative range, and shimmer. The least obvious and most important is the shimmer factor. Cutter explains:

Most aquatic insects create or trap bubbles of gas at some time in their lives. They use these bubbles for respiration, buoyancy, and as an aid for escaping the sub-adult form   Bubble-encrusted bugs are extremely visible underwater, and trout often swim right past other food items to snare a glittering insect. . . . The best bubble-trapping nymph/pupa   patterns are the LaFontaine Sparkle

Pupa tied with wool rather than Antron and the Bird’s Nest. Both the Bird’s Nest and the Sparkle Pupa have an overbody that acts as a cage that holds the bubble against the body of the fly.

Cutter adds that the way to achieve the shimmer effect is by vigorously shaking your nymph in desiccant powder as you would a dry fly, or even better, scrub the powder into the fibers of the fly with the applicator brush. In the water, the powder traps air, giving the appearance of an insect encased in a bubble — an artificial uncannily imitating life.

A Subsequent Discovery

Soon after reading this, and still on the hunt for more Bird’s Nest insight, I read that the original pattern debuted in November 1980 in two versions: the natural version and the spectral version. The natural used a dubbing blend of 50 percent Australian possum, 40 percent coyote, and 10 percent natural seal’s fur. The spectral version used dyed seal’s fur in colors across the entire visual spectrum. The difficulty of obtaining coyote and the legal (and moral) impossibility of securing seal’s fur likely account for the many contemporary adaptations of the natural version, sometimes using synthetic materials. Weilenmann, for example, substitutes hare’s mask for the coyote. But while the natural version has been adapted and has endured, the spectral version seems largely forgotten. I have found only three sources on the internet that mention it. Cal Bird’s “spectral theme” is also noted in Mike Valla’s 2013 book, The Founding Flies, but without much additional description.

Why Bother?

Why bother with the spectral version, if everyone seems satisfied with the natural version? The short answer is: because Cal Bird was a very smart, shy, but supremely generous man. The longer answer adds the matter of Cal’s profession. He was a trained artist and professional calligrapher. His artistry influenced his fly designs and tying. Either by acquired knowledge or intuition, he knew that color matters to trout, and in the spectral version, he developed a way to include the complete range of colors in a single fly: the primary colors red, yellow, and blue, plus the secondary colors orange, purple, and green.

Though naturals and spectrals are constructed exactly the same way, they differ slightly in the dubbing blend used to create the abdomen and thorax. This difference is small — 10 percent — yet significant. In Cal Bird’s spectral blend, the 10 percent seal’s fur was a mix of fibers painstakingly dyed in every primary and secondary color. The chart below sums up the distinction between the two dubbing mixes.

A Resulting Challenge

Tying a spectral Bird’s Nest exactly as Cal did appeared out of reach for me for a multitude of obvious reasons, including skill level and the unavailability of materials. So, the challenge became how to get as close as possible to the original. Searching my collection of “stuff I’m going to use someday,” I found some packages that read, “A natural seal substitute.” Those packages were Wapsi’s Angora goat in all but two of the required colors. Deeming Angora goat good enough for starters, I acquired the missing colors. Unable to obtain purple Angora goat at the time, I substituted purple Hareline UV Ice Dub.

Pesky Percentages

With the dubbing material challenge met, moving forward now meant achieving the recommended percentages to get the blend proportions correct in the 10 percent of the dubbing composed of six distinct colors. Musing on the matter, one day it dawned on me to create a chart in Microsoft Word — a grid that would keep the allotted spaces proportionate to each other. I made the grid with 10 columns and 6 rows representing the entirety of the materials — 5 columns for the 50 percent Australian possum and four columns for the 40 percent hare’s mask, and the remaining column for the 10 percent mix of six colors constituting the spectral blend.

I reduced the chart to approximate dimensions of 3-1/2 inches wide and 1-1/2 inches deep and printed it. Given the grid’s precise visual boundaries and accurate proportions, I arranged the respective materials directly on the chart. The spectral colors required just a pinch of dubbing each. Skeptical about getting a really good mix by hand, I had acquired a small coffee grinder for the task. This would be my first experience with it. I scooped up the chart-proportioned fibers, placed them in the coffee grinder, turned it on, and let it whirl for 30 seconds. The result astonished me — the fluffiest, most airy batch of dubbing I’d ever seen, which quickly distinguished itself as the easiest to apply I have ever twisted on tying thread. Looking at the finished flies in good natural light, the embedded colors winked discreetly, visible even to the naked eye. Using a magnifying glass for a closer look nicely amplified the wow factor. What a gorgeous fly! Now I understood why the spectral version of the fly had been “forgotten”: the doubly daunting prospect of obtaining the original materials and getting the colors right. Cal Bird took a good deal more trouble with that than most tyers are willing to go to, including dyeing materials with Rit Dye #42 and with onion skins, for example. But the advent of more modern materials and processes has brought pleasingly close renditions of the original fly within reach of a moderately skilled tyer.

So why bother with the spectral version? The fuller answer to the question is that it was great fun overcoming the challenges and solving the problems involved in reproducing something that looked believably similar to Cal Bird’s original, and the end result is a uniquely beautiful and functional fly, because the spectral version has both the movement, shape, imitative range, color, and shimmer of the natural version and the added attraction of color across the entire visual spectrum. No wonder Cal would press a couple of these into the hand of a friend and say, “Try them . . . fish see whatever they want with these.” The color spectrum makes its appeal universal.

If You Want to Tie the Bird’s Nest

Prior to tying a Bird’s Nest of any version, you might consider consulting two online resources. The first is a brief article with good tying instructions by Dan Kellogg of the Southern Oregon Fly Fishers at http://www.rogueflyfishers.org/otf/may08.htm (see QR code). However, he recommends a dubbing loop for achieving spikiness in the abdomen. With the particular above-mentioned dubbing blend spun in the coffee grinder, I found a dubbing loop was unnecessary. When building the thorax, though, a dubbing loop yields a much better result, especially if you take the approach outlined in Step 8 of the tying instructions presented below. The second useful online resource is Hans Weilenmann’s YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvq3UUDCO7k (see QR code). He demonstrates tying the pattern well, and the result is truly superb. The tying instructions I provide here are mostly based on Weilenmann’s video. Photographs of the Bird’s Nest tied by Cal Bird, such as those in Valla’s book, typically show a relatively long and slender thread head in front of the thorax. I make a narrower thread head, which seems to be the preference for many modern tyers. Cal’s fly has also evolved to include bead-head and jig-hook versions, as well as a variety of colors to enhance a tyer’s imitative objective.

Materials for the Spectral Bird’s Nest

Hook: 2XL medium wire, TMC 2302 or 3761 or Daiichi 1710, sizes 10 to 16, or light-wire equivalent.

Thread: 8/0, color to match dubbing

Weight (optional): Lead wire

Rib: Bright copper wire

Tail: Lemon wood duck barbs

Abdomen: 50 percent Australian possum (short), 40 percent coyote mask or hare’s mask, 10 spectral blend.

Collar/wing: Lemon wood duck

Thorax: Same as the abdomen

Tying the Spectral Bird’s Nest

Step 1: Attach the thread just behind the eye and wrap one-third of the shank length. Trim the tag.

Step 2: Tie in the ribbing on the underside of the hook at the point where the initial thread wraps stopped. I picked up this tip from Weilenmann’s video. He doesn’t say why he recommends this, but doing it establishes a mark where the abdomen should end and where the wing and collar should be tied in, a great help in keeping fly’s proportions correct.

Step 3: At the point where the wire was attached, tie in a tail of 8 to 10 fibers on top of the hook shank. The fibers should be about one-half to three-quarters the length of the shank and extend past the bend. Trim away the excess.

Step 4: Wrap the thread to the bend, keeping the tail fibers on top of the shank and the ribbing underneath.

Step 5: For the abdomen, make a tight dubbing noodle. Wrap it forward, tight at first, then build up a taper, then taper it down a little to the point onethird of the shank length behind the eye, where the rib was tied in.

Step 6: Wrap the ribbing forward in evenly spaced turns to the front of the abdomen. Tie it off and trim any excess.

Step 7: Measure the hackle/wing feather so that the tips extend just past the bend of the hook. (The tail should extend beyond the hackle/wing) Wrap the feather around the hook with two loose distribution wraps. Check for 360-degree coverage and length before securing it with more wraps.

Step 8: For a spiky thorax, form a dubbing loop. Arrange the dubbing in a V shape and insert the widest end of the V at the top of the loop, nearest the hook shank. Spin the loop tool to tighten the loop and wrap the thorax forward. With the first and each successive turn of the dubbing, train the fibers back toward the bend. With each wrap, the dubbing narrows as it proceeds toward the hook eye, and if brushed back with each turn, blends in with the wing and abdomen, imparting a wild, f lowing look to the fly. A dubbing brush can also create this look. Tie it off and trim the excess.

Step 9: If desired, build a thread head. Whip finish and apply a slight dab of head cement.

A Spectral Cal Bird

After all this, you might recall that, as Phil Rowley says, “Pretty flies catch fishermen. Ugly flies catch fish.” Is the spectral version just another pretty fly? In response I appeal to your imagination:

You are knee deep in a gorgeous stretch of the Truckee River. You’re making good casts and getting good drifts with a good fly, but not a single take occurs. You try another fly. No takes. You try yet another fly with the same result. It feels like there’s not a trout in the river, but you keep casting. As bewilderment begins to degenerate into frustration, a fellow fly fisher appears, seemingly out of nowhere. You didn’t notice, but he has been watching, sympathetic with your exercise in futility. His approach seems premeditated, as if he wants to impart something. He heads your way. Drawing near, he asks you to open your hand. He is such a gentle soul that your hand opens involuntarily. Into your palm he presses two nymph patterns that look like nothing you’ve ever seen in any bin in any fly shop anywhere — wild, f lowy, rich with hints of color. He smiles with warmth and confidence, “Try these. They are whatever the trout want them to be.” He turns to leave, and you ask him his name. “Cal,” he replies. “Cal Bird.” “Thank you, Mr. Bird,” you reply. “You are quite welcome,” he says quietly, still smiling, knowing that your luck about to change.

That is essentially what has just happened in these last few minutes. The gift of the spectral Bird’s Nest has appeared out of nowhere, from the spectre of Cal Bird himself.

Who knew? Now you do. The only difference is that you’ll actually have to tie the flies yourself.