I recently delivered a one-hour stillwater presentation as part of a two-day Fly-Fishing 101 class put on by the Gold Country Fly Fishers. One of many questions asked that afternoon was, “What is a terrestrial?” Groping for an answer, I quickly threw out, “In fly-fishing jargon, any creature whose life cycle involves terrestrial contact, but that might end up close enough to or into the water, where it could be eaten by a hungry or territorial fish”— not perfect, but not bad for an on-the-spot, writer’s creative license definition.
Another hand went up. “Give me some examples.” I mentioned ants and termites (see “Windows of Opportunity,” in the September/October 2018 issue of California Fly Fisher) and then continued to rattle off whatever else came to mind: beetles, leafhoppers (called jassids on the LeTort in Pennsylvania), ladybugs, moths, butterflies, grasshoppers, locusts, spiders, crickets, cicadas, earthworms (as opposed to aquatic annelid worms), bees, and yellow jackets. Add lizards, mice, lemmings (particularly if you’re fishing in Alaska, Canada, and Siberia), snakes, low-flying or perched birds, and small ducklings. Although they’re not living things, you could throw in flower buds, fruit, and sadly, cigarette butts and fish food pellets, too. My ad-hoc definition is realistic enough to include a whole lot of fish food as “terrestrials” beyond the ants and beetles that most people think of when the category comes up.
Fly patterns for imitating birds exist. At Davis Lake in Oregon, out in the vast reed marshes where the bass live, my hoarding friend pulled the only bird imitation I have ever seen out of his prodigious collection of fly boxes and rolled an eight-pound northern largemouth that was looking for a big meal worth the energy expended in capturing it. The fish had earlier refused a six-inch-long black Tsunami pike fly.
On a local California foothill lake, I heard a shoreline commotion and out of the corner of my eye caught a glimpse of a large bass trying to take a bird perched on a low-hanging branch. I turned in my float tube and with one short back cast fired a chartreuse Sneaky Pete toward the still-radiating rings, luckily hitting my target. A frustrated fish blew up as the fly neared the water, and I was able to land my biggest bass of the evening.
Stuff like this does happen. In addition to blowing our minds, it reminds us that we shouldn’t get locked in on certain patterns and that we need to think out of the box more often.
I take the liberty of calling damselfly and dragonfly adults “terrestrials.” They are dynamite in South America for large trout. And while pondering the definition of a terrestrial fly, I remembered that my friend once hooked a hungry feral cat when his large Whistler overshot its target and landed on Delta riprap next to a bamboo thicket. It was a challenge removing the hook, and the cat put up an unconventional fight. Can we call Dan Blanton’s famous striper pattern, the Whistler, a terrestrial?
Many bass bugs can be called terrestrials, if we stretch the concept, including frogs, which often start their last journey by hopping off terra firma. On the lower Yuba, we might see adult Skwala stoneflies as a type of terrestrial, because they crawl out of the river, cross land, climb into streamside vegetation, mate, and launch clumsy egg-deposition flights that send them out over and into the water.
You can fill a box with grasshopper patterns, including Dave’s Hopper, Whit’s Hopper, Joe’s Hopper, Schroeder’s Hi-Vis Hopper, Morrish Hopper, the Quick-n-Easy Hopper, Panty Dropper Hopper, Big Secret, Baby Boy, and many more. Check out the number of hopper patterns in a well-stocked fly shop. Another box will be needed for weird foam creations of various colors and for popular large foam patterns like the Chernobyl Ant. Don’t forget Madam Xs, and perhaps last, but not of lesser importance, the category-defying foam Fat Alberts. Rest assured that someone will change wing and foam body color, add a new synthetic tinsel, put the tying instructions on YouTube, and give the pattern another name.
Fat Alberts and similar foam flies, some looking natural and some not, serve as wonderful indicators, as well as primary attractor flies. After all, fish do shy away on occasion from red, yellow, orange, or white Ping-Pong balls. Trout have been known to smash a pink-and-gray leggy Fat Albert used as an indicator, as well as my favorite, the black-bodied and white-winged cicada imitation with copper ribbing on the shank. Often I start by fishing a shallow ledge or weedbed edge with chironomids hung under a leggy terrestrial. As the sun lowers or cloud cover increases, fish may hit the natural-looking indicator.
Fat Alberts were the most common fly used by my group in Argentina and Chile, both in the rivers and on the lakes. These foam-bodied flies approach the length of two thumbnails. Chilean guides fish them far out from the boat and constantly remind you to “twitch, twitch.” Here, we tend to fish them dead in the water on a lake, making long casts from stationary or slowly drifting or rowed watercraft. Targeted fish should see the fly, leader, line, and angler in that order. In still waters, that’s our version of presentation.
There’s a terrestrial we don’t see much of in the Western United States, but trout line up on Argentina’s Malleo, Aluminé, and numerous other rivers in late spring to feed on plump green inchworm moth larvae that gorge on the leaves of overhanging trees and fall into the water. It is a period when fish put on weight and feed with abandon. Inchworm moth larva of many species are common worldwide, and in the Eastern United States, savvy anglers fish Green Weenies to imitate them. Even though some moth species lay eggs in the fall, rather than in the spring, they all hatch in the spring and can be a major food source. Branches unseasonably stripped of leaves are a likely sign of an infestation. Keep in mind, too, that several species of leaf beetles target willows and cottonwoods, both of which are found along trout waters.
One of my most memorable fly-fishing experiences took place on several Chilean lakes out of Coyhaique, the jumping-off point for trekking and fly fishing in Chilean Patagonia. An unusually dry season had lowered water levels in the rivers, and they weren’t fishing well. Bigger fish had moved into the lakes, the lagos. These were our backup, always a good idea to have on such a trip. Our operators had horse-packed into the lakes and stashed rubber rafts with oars, pedestal seats, and small outboards. Starting from a lodge, which was remote in itself, we used jet-powered pontoons on the Picacho River to access distant trailheads, then hiked through ferns and fuchsias up to Roosevelt Lake. It was named after Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. president, legendary Rough Rider commandant in the Spanish American War, fanatical outdoorsman, and visionary conservationist who protected 230 million acres during his terms in office.
Once we were there, Geronimo, our guide for the day, because he knew the lake and was the strongest, rowed stealthily and pointed to cover he wanted us to target. At dinner the night before, his descriptions of the lake and the size of the trout moved me to unpack a 6-weight saltwater fly rod lined with an aggressive bass taper that would throw large flies. It goes with me everywhere. I also pulled out a traveling angler’s stash of bass bugs. The rod proved perfect for throwing large terrestrials tight to cover on a breezy day and holding hooked fish away from dense structure. At the lake, we fired the small outboard and hopscotched uplake to better-looking shorelines and a tributary inlet. It was hard to focus on the fishing, because the lake’s edge was covered with verdant ferns, shell beaches, reed walls, and firecracker red fuchsias. Our eyes worked up mountainsides from lakeside toward high glaciers. We were the only humans in a sizeable drainage ringed by towering mountains.
We didn’t catch many fish, but those that came to our terrestrials were huge, amber-colored, red-and-black-spotted brown trout. The visuals left us breathless as our fish rose from six and seven feet deep in clear water, hell-bent on disabling and consuming our Fat Alberts. At lunch in a sheltered cove, I handed my rod to Geronimo, and he cast the bug to targets as though he had done it for years. We got to watch the spectacle from a different perspective as he took two huge fish. He had never seen a bass, yet he knew instinctively where trout would be that fed and behaved just like bass.
Geronimo sensed a front moving in, and we motored back to our trailhead. Halfway to our stash point, after which we faced two miles of sliding and stumbling down a muddy trail to our pontoons on the river, a cold rain drove horizontally across the lake, adding to spray from our raft’s bow. I was in the front seat and miserable, but strangely, while taking my last looks at Roosevelt Lake and trying to put my thoughts together, in spite of the piercing rain and wind, I realized that I was no longer uncomfortable. A state of grace had set in that lasted until I saw the hot tub back at our remote lodge.
On our next day’s adventure, hunting for more trophy browns, we again avoided fishing the river and worked up a bamboo-and-snag-filled tributary channel in a journey that reminded us of scenes from The African Queen. At times, we jumped out, dragged our raft, and used machetes to widen the channel. Our efforts accessed an unnamed lake that we christened Pterodactyl, for it reminded us of Jurassic Park. Looking at downed trees, structure of all types, lily pads, rock outcroppings, and more red fuchsias, I immediately thought “bass” and started fishing with my bugging rod. Benjamin, our guide for the day, said no one had been here all year. He rejected a chartreuse Sneaky Pete slider that I always carry and tied on a Fat Albert. I slid it off sloped rocks, bounced it off fallen timber, and threw it into openings in Southern Hemisphere lily pads and reed forests, always twitching it when my guide tapped on my shoulder. As at Roosevelt Lake, we could see our targets rise and accelerate through the column of clear water, frantically determined to obliterate their prey before it could escape.
It’s easy to see how terrestrials wind up in the water and become a notable part of fish diets. Some call it the “blunder” effect. Insects seem to hit glassy water somewhat the way birds fly into clear window panes. That’s why casts on a lake devoid of rises may provoke rises when flies are thrown to the slicks and why working a foam line that concentrates downed insects is a good idea. It’s the angler’s job to know when this type of food is available and recognize these situations. We know that hot August and September winds blow grasshoppers onto streams and lakes, likewise that rains wash worms, ants, and other terrestrial creatures into tributaries. Accidents happen, and those creatures become part of the food chain.
Once, on a whim during the slow part of the day, I explored the forest floor above the Little Truckee and found large, woody anthills teeming with busy insects. In Oregon a year ago, we saw a haze in the sky while returning to our host’s riverside home and realized as we got closer that it was a massive flight of mating ants. I often start fishing with an ant pattern if no working fish are visible, on both moving and still waters. Terrestrials fall from the sky, land on the water, and float, often cattywampus, but eventually sink. Soft-bodied ants fished subsurface on long, fine leaders are a way to take highly selective trout in lakes such as Milton Reservoir, which is surrounded by tall trees.
At times, fish will be highly selective when feeding on terrestrial patterns. It behooves you to carry more than one pattern. At others, as in a late-spring carpenter ant fall on my home water, Scotts Flat Reservoir, they will take darn near anything black.
Trout in alpine lakes depend heavily on terrestrials. A dozen years ago, I was researching and putting together thoughts on an article about fly fishing Lake Tahoe. I sensed that there might be a credibility issue, because the idea was so preposterous, but I was catching a few fish here and there, found two or three folks who were doing the same, and stumbled on writings by Ralph Cutter where he mentioned trout feeding on terrestrials in the lake and explained the phenomenon of up-slope blow-in.
Gary La Fontaine’s Fly Fishing the Alpine Lakes devotes a chapter to discussing this phenomenon and illustrating its importance. In the morning, sunlight warms valley air cooled during the previous evening. That air rises, often rapidly as more direct sunrays compound the warming effect, and it carries a potpourri of insects with it. An atmospheric wave climbs rapidly and eventually drops its insect hitchhikers miles away. Some arrive alive, others are deposited lifeless. Both are a great food source and help create environmental niches in which trout can survive. The process may reverse in the late afternoon as mountain shadows and the rarefied atmosphere cool air that drops and carries with it more insects. Air warming in the Central Valley and rising up the west slope of the Sierra is a great example of up-slope blow-in. Terrestrials are found worldwide and are significant in the diet of many fish species. Their presence and significance varies, but such insects can be found along trout waters in California, and their imitations in a fly box and subsequent artful presentation can make the difference between success and failure, often in fooling highly selectively trophy fish. When fish refuse your size 18 or 20 emerging midges, be a contrarian and see what happens when you tie on a Fat Albert, a big hopper pattern, or a Madam X.
