Colorful, often brightly iridescent, and highly maneuverable, adult dragonf lies, taxonomic order Odonata, suborder Anisoptera, have two sets of independently operating wings, giving them aerial maneuvering capabilities rivaling or exceeding advanced-generation fighter aircraft. This evolutionary advantage aids in preying on airborne insects, a major part of their food supply. In some species, the wingspread may reach six inches, approaching minidrone size. Dragonfly nymphs, which can be an inch to two inches long — relatively huge, for aquatic insects — are predatory denizens of aquatic forests and underwater detritus fields. Like their smaller cousins, damselflies, suborder Zygoptera, the most widespread and best-known member of the Odonata, dragonflies are fodder for stillwater trout and bass. As with damselflies, imitations of both nymphs and adults belong in any stillwater angler’s big-fish and searching fly boxes.
Both insects occupy widespread habitat niches that range from low-altitude, slow-moving streams and lakes to still waters in acidic alpine granitic soil basins in the Sierra, a ten-thousand-foot-plus difference in elevation, but they are most abundant in relatively warmer alkaline waters, where the presence of calcium carbonate promotes aquatic plant growth and exoskeleton development, imperative if aquatic insects with multiple skeletal molts are to survive and grow. Think limestone, high desert, and volcanic soils. While dragonfly emergences there don’t rival the damselfly hatches at California’s Davis Lake and other lakes in the eastern Sierra and the Cascades in Oregon, they are still significant hatches that attract both fish and anglers.
Dragonfly nymphs are either weed dwellers or mud dwellers. Weed dwellers are longer and thinner, while mud dwellers have shorter, plump, rotund bodies. I’m not aware of different fly patterns being tied for the different types, but no doubt some obsessive f ly-tying imitationist has done so. Weed dwellers hang from weed stems and quietly await prey that wanders close. To attack, they suck water in through their anus and then rapidly eject it to propel them like miniature rockets as far as four to six inches, a significant distance in their microworld. Mud dwellers have abdomens and longer, spiderlike legs for crawling and holding onto subsurface rocks, debris, and prey. Both can change color, from earth-tone neutrals to shades of green. Both have ravenous appetites and eat most anything entering their realm, including smaller representatives of their own taxonomic order and small fish.
It has been said that 15 dragonfly nymphs can yield 1,000 calories. I can’t verify this, but it explains why f ish of many species will opportunistically eat these nymphs, even when a significant hatch or emergence of smaller aquatic insects is available. In some countries, adult dragonflies are eaten by humans, often after being fried in a tempuralike coating.
Adult dragonflies, too, are a part of the aquatic food chain for fish, but not nearly as important as nymphs. Flying insects are hard for fish to capture, but will be taken at times if they wind up in the surface film or rest on a low-lying riparian tree branch or reeds. On many occasions, I’ve tossed a winged adult pattern to selective trout in open water, only to see my work of art rejected. Target a lowoverhanging branch or a pocket in a reed bed where fish have previously gotten a good mouthful, though, and you may hook up. An adult floating dragonfly replica, tied with hollow deer hair wings that float it and don’t flutter in casting, with bulging eyes, a blue thorax, and segmented abdomen, is a good choice when working shoreline structure. I found a colorful 12-fly “Aklebug” selection in a 1931 Weber Lifelike Fly Company catalogue, a collection that was obviously composed of dragonfly imitations.
On an early exploratory trip to the Cascade lakes region in Central Oregon, one that led to many more visits over the years, two fishing partners and I were told that if we could collect dragonfly nymphs, we would be able to catch Crane Prairie’s huge rainbows. We looked for swampy shoreline areas, rooting around in shallow warmer bays with downed timber, volcanic rocks, and reeds. It got us gloriously dirty, wet, and cold, but we filled tobacco tins with moss, water, and dragonfly nymphs.
We impaled the nymphs on bare hooks and gently cast them to the base of the impoundment’s thousands of dead, sun-bleached, bone-white tree trunks that crowd the f lats along its winding, spring-fed tributary channels. Nearly every nymph, when allowed to sink slowly, yielded a take, often accompanied with a nearly imperceptible but then rapidly accelerating run. We landed few of these fish — most were broken off on tree trunks in the submerged forest — but we learned something, and later, we would tie and fish dragonfly artificials, both nymphs and adults.
And dragonflies aren’t just fish food. Like concentrations of nighthawks, swallows, or other birds, large numbers of dragonflies may signal aquatic insect hatches such as mayflies, mosquitoes, and other species. I spend lots of time in the North Lake Tahoe region, often fishing at least a part of the day. A warm August day with high water temperatures hasn’t been the best time on the Truckee for me unless the wind is blowing and the hopper fishing picks up, but cold water flowing out of Stampede Reservoir offered possibilities on the Little Truckee between Stampede and Boca Reservoir. Five cars were in the upper parking lot and suggested competition for the best water. Still, I donned waders and headed down the bluff path, almost immediately seeing two fly fishers working what I have come to call the Indicator Run. Often I watch from the shaded bluff for a while to know what’s hatching before getting in the water. Fish were rising steadily, including several of the Little Truckee’s elusive and highly selective big browns.
The guys below me were decent casters, making reasonably good presentations and drag-free drifts, but the fish had them cursing under their breaths and visibly frustrated. I decided to watch until they tired and moved on, because I could see more anglers farther downstream. My opening came when they started reeling in, and the first angler waved me into the slow run. “Thanks for giving us some room,” he said. “We’re done. The trout are taking PMDs, but they are the largest PMDs I’ve ever seen — they look like they’ve been nuked and have a faint light green tint. I tried five or six patterns. I’m whipped.” He turned back and asked, “Do you have any ideas?”
I didn’t, but did have a small bug net. Between my net and his baseball hat, we managed to scoop up several of the fluttering bugs. At a distance, I would have guessed they were PMDs, but on close inspection, as my new friend said, they were bigger, with a slight greenish tint in the body and wings, and they had a shortened, blood-red-tipped abdomen. I was baffled, too.
My new friends left, still muttering their frustrations, and after resting the water a bit, I started fishing, believing in my heart that my longer, finer tippet, accurate kneeling cast from beyond the water’s edge, and better presentation and drag-free drift would take a fish. It didn’t, though, and after trying several other patterns, I, too, left, as frustrated as the earlier anglers. I did note that there were lots of large dragonflies over the water, but they were darting and so fast as to offer no clue.
It turns out that the “nuked” Pale Morning Duns were actually larger, far less common Ephemerella flavina mayflies. Not only that, but the dragonflies I saw were chasing them down, attacking from behind, and nipping off the energy-rich posterior abdomen segments in midair, leaving a cleanly sheared bloodred stump. I found that out from Lisa Cutter, who told me that her husband, Ralph, author of the classic Sierra Trout Guide and Fish Food, had encountered same rare occurrence of dragonfly predation and had identified the mayfly.
Dragonfly nymphs are also good searching patterns when other choices aren’t working. Several years ago, two friends, both very accomplished anglers, headed for the Kamloops region of British Columbia, a heralded destination holding hundreds of alkaline seep lakes. My friends had a tough week. Both finding and catching were below expectations for a legendary stillwater Mecca. One who is an advanced indicator fly fisher, a very good way to fish in BC, popularized by Brian Chan in Flyfishing Strategies for Stillwaters, worked through his repertoire to no avail. The other, the late angler/ author Jim Cramer, was something of a contrarian in that he often fished patterns not commonly used and loved to experiment. On their last morning, he rummaged in his fly box and found an experimental dragonfly pattern made of green peacock herl that he spun on the hook and then trimmed as is done when contouring and finishing hair bass bugs. Wind had moved his pontoon into the end of a lake where there was a shoal and a weed edge. In fewer than a dozen casts to the edge using an intermediate line, he hooked and landed two rainbows, one measuring 27 inches and the other 28 inches.
It was nearing time to pack up and head back to California. He rowed his pontoon toward his partner farther up the lake. In a nice gesture, he handed him his last example of the pattern, and his friend in short order took 21-inch, 24inch, 26-inch, and 30-inch acrobatic Kamloops rainbows. Still in a state of shock over their success, but gratified, too, that they had figured out a solution, both quit fishing and left the water. A long road home lay ahead, and what was a frustrating trip had turned memorable as both took lifetime fish.
Bass and trout will cruise reed beds, rooting out nymphs clinging to shoreline vegetation, and anglers should target the disturbance they create. In Chile, where brown and rainbow trout obtain much of their food from terrestrials and orient to the surface, a dragonfly adult pattern cast to what looks like bass habitat will produce explosive rises. In the clear water of Andean lakes, you can see fish rising to your fly from as much as five or more feet down. The fish may have launched from a lie in a reed indentation, from under a log, or hidden in the shade of a large rock.
Of course, when trout are feeding with abandon on dragonflies, there’s usually more going on — and a pattern that’s worth taking note of. After all, an axiom in fly fishing for any species anywhere in the world is to identify a pattern and then milk it for all that it’s worth. Another axiom is that fish are never evenly distributed in a body of water. In Chilean Patagonia, another fishing partner and I were blown off Lago Central by its infamous wind after taking trophy rainbows and browns on terrestrial patterns, including Fat Alberts and dragonfly adults. We moved to a small, 60-acre lake, obtaining access from our guide’s rancher friend with the help of a loaf of bread, a few pesos, and a bottle of Malbec.
In its small basin, we were protected and started working the shoreline from a raft with large, blue-bodied adult dragonfly patterns cast tight to cover. Nothing came to our flies. My partner and I thought the day was over. Our guide said, “Keep casting!” Suddenly, after covering 40 percent of the lake’s shoreline with no action, nearly every cast produced a vicious rise from amber-gold 17-to-21-inch brown trout. We took and released over a dozen fish apiece. This perked us up. We spotted a slowly cruising fish that seemed oblivious to our presence and played with making shorter and shorter casts, trying to take it with less than five feet of leader out the tip, testing the wariness of trout that rarely saw flies or even humans. The fearless fish that prompted the experiment surged toward the fly and immediately broke my rod tip. Then the bite stopped as quickly as it had started. We cast to barren water as we completed our circumnavigation.
These Chilean browns were behaving like bass. Fish were coming from the protected inshore side of weed bed edges and from sun-warmed water. The productive shoreline was from the northeast to southwest sides of the lake, which were illuminated by a warming fall afternoon Chilean sun, just as at California’s Clear Lake, we find March bass on the northwest end of the lake, which is protected from spring winds and is usually 1-1/2 degrees warmer.
It’s a good idea to have some dragonfly imitations in your stillwater boxes, and they will work as stillwater searching patterns, but when you can identify a pattern in which the time, place, and conditions are right, fish them with confidence and hang on.
