Fountains of Youth – Classic trout flies that have withstood the test of time … flies that remain “forever young”

by Rusty Dunn

When you daydream about trout fishing, , what flies are your dreams made of?  Hoppers?  Ants?  Snappy attractors?  The first choice of many veteran anglers is beetles.  Trout are always receptive to a wayward beetle, and plump imitations cast along grassy banks can coax an observant trout out of hiding.  But did you know that beetles are often more abundant under the water than on top of it?, Or that beetles are available to trout even in the middle of winter?  Many species of beetles live most or all of their lives in the river.  If you’ve examined the bottom rubble of a trout stream, you’ve undoubtedly seen aquatic beetle larvae, but you prob­ably mistook them for caddisflies or stoneflies.  The three taxonomic groups are easily confused, but trout care little about taxonomy and a lot about food.

North America hosts over 1,000 species of aquatic bee­tles.  That’s more species of aquatic beetles than may­flies!  Many families of beetle are entirely aquatic, living essentially their complete life cycle underwater.  Others are semi-aquatic, living either the larval or adult stage (but not both) under­water.  Examples of aquatic beetles include water pennies, riffle beetles, whirligig beetles, water wee­vils, and leaf beetles.  Aquatic beetle larvae extract dissolved oxygen from the water, but aquatic adults rely on atmospheric oxygen to varying degrees.  Such adults must regu­larly swim or crawl to the surface to replenish their air supply, and that behavior makes them vulnerable to trout.  Most aquatic beetles overwin­ter as adults and are available to trout all year long.  No matter what the season, if you don’t see insects on the wing, try one of fly fish­ing’s oldest beetle imitations, the Coch-y-Bonddu wet fly.  That’s right, a beetle wet fly!

The Coch-y-Bonddu imitates both aquatic beetles and terrestrial species that have fallen into a stream.  The name is Welsh in origin and translates roughly to “red and black”, which describes a common terrestrial bee­tle of the UK that the fly imitates (Phyllopertha horti­cola).  Like most vintage flies, the same basic pattern goes by many different names and recipes, having been replicated, modified, and plagiarized by genera­tions of angling authors.  The Coch-y-Bonddu origi­nated sometime in the 1700s as the Shorn Fly.  It was described in Charles Bowlker’s The Art of Angling in 1792, but by the mid-1800s, its favored name had become the Coch-y-Bonddu.  Similar patterns over the years were named the Welshman’s Button, Hazel Fly, Fern Web, Bracken Clock, Marlow Buzz, and others.

The term ‘coch-y-bonddu’ also refers to the poul­try hackle used to dress the fly.  It is a color variant of red gamecock in which red feathers have a black outer mar­gin and list (the webby stripe surround­ing the stem) with red in between.  Coch-y-bonddu hackle is quite rare and usually substituted by furnace hackle, a red feather that has the black list but lacks the black mar­gin.  Fierce arguments spice up the literature about the differences between coch-y-bonddu and fur­nace, caused in part by the fact that true coch-y-bond­du is a color found only in roosters, never in hens.  A related but also rare color variant of red game­cock is ‘kneecap’, which is coch-y-bonddu in reverse.  Knee­cap feathers have a red outer margin and list with black in between.

With its soft hackle, plump body, and splash of spar­kle, the Coch-y-Bonddu may indeed resemble an aquatic or drowned beetle, but it looks a lot like many other sub­surface in­sects as well.  Its inherent bugginess and long history of suc­cess make the Coch-y-Bonddu an all-pur­pose subsurface wingless wet.  As Courtney Williams wrote, “Wet or dry, and at any time of the season, it is always a good pattern to try on a strange river.”  Give it a try yourself, even if fishing a wet-fly beetle imitation sounds somehow wrong.

Copyright 2020, Rusty Dunn

Coch-y-Bonddu

Bronze peacock herl is a color variant of common green India peafowl, but it is not easily obtained.  Most tyers simply substitute green peacock herl.  However, if green peacock herl is left in direct sunlight for a cou­ple of weeks, it bleaches to a beautiful bronze color.