Before I started to tie the fully dressed flies, I collected feathers and after awhile, started to pair feathers for future use as wings, sides or veilings. I happily plucked a feather from here and one from there and as long as they had the same size and shape, they were a pair (or so I thought.) This went on for several years. I had literally many hundreds of pairs of feathers from common to exotic all nicely put in zip loc bags. I thought I was pretty smart for all of this work I did as I pawed through countless thousands of molted feathers from Peafowl to Parrots.
Well, the day finally came when I decided to actually start to tie fully dressed flies. When I started dipping into my hard won pairs, it didn’t take long to realize that I had made some serious errors in my pairing routine.
When you want to tie two feathers back to back either as veils or wings, every curve and the location of the shaft and overall shape must be exactly the same or very nearly so. A correctly matched pair of feathers will collapse to a perfectly straight line as viewed on edge (see photos). All feathers are extremely strong and their shapes are part of their strength. A straight curve will push in a more or less straight line where a compound curve which is mostly the case, will tend to corkscrew. If one feather of a pair is a little smaller or has a slightly different curve, the stronger of the two when placed back to back and held there, will push the weaker one out of the way. Even if you can get two dissimilar feathers to flatten out back to back seemingly in harmony, a slight movement of one will disrupt the harmony and the pair/wing will “blow up”. This can also happen with veils. You must remember the strength of the feathers and the fact that they are being held by a very tiny bit of thread on a very small section of the shafts. All of that tension is trying to exert leverage on the tie in point and “hinging” can take place very easily. For this reason, a very tight tie in is essential to wing stability.
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| Matched pair of feathers | Feathers back to back | Pair of feathers collapsed |
For some reason which I am not sure of, exact matching pairs of feathers will cancel each other’s strength and almost lay flat against each other with very little effort compared to dissimilar feathers.
When you are matching feathers from a skin, finding pairs is relatively easy compared to molted feathers. On a skin, feathers going straight down the center of the back and breast will be fairly straight compared to feathers further away. Those few center feathers will tend to have straight curves while the rest will be compound curves.
Matching from molted feathers is far more difficult and time consuming. Remember that only feathers from the exact opposite spots on a bird will match exactly. Now, consider that a bird has maybe thousands of feathers and if there is more than one bird represented in the molted feathers, this number grows drastically. I have literally many pounds of molted parrot feathers from various kinds of birds and numbers of them. Out of say a pound of medium size body feathers; there might be a few dozen pairs IF they are from one bird. And add that every bird is a little different and you can see the amount of work that can be involved with pairing feathers. This is the reason that one needs literally thousands of feathers to get a fairly good number of pairs.
Matching feathers for sides and shoulders is a bit different. Here you have a little more leeway. The wing will support two sides that are a little different so exact pairs aren’t critical. BEST but not critical.
I bet I have spent several thousand hours just pairing feathers over the years. I used to kinda like it but not so much now, depending on the kind of feathers. Bottom line, it is tedious work but necessary in order to tie flies that look good and hold together. I still have many large and small bags of unsorted feathers that taunt me every time I open a cabinet or box.
This is the important part of this article. My test for a matched pair of feathers. It is an easy, yet critical several steps. First, I match pairs that have the overall same size and shape (outside shape, curves and location of their shafts), hold them together, back (concave sides) to back, hold them up to a bright light to see if their shafts line up and finally, I flick them sharply with my finger. If they stay together and don’t move, they are a pair. I will then put a dab of hot glue to their bottom ends and put them along with similar pairs in a zip loc bag. Feathers of the same size and colours are sorted together in boxes. I can go to any box and look for the colour feathers I want in a matter of seconds. I have thousands of pairs already to go. This saves a lot of time when I am tying a fly. If I can’t find paired feathers that will work, I will go through my skins and sort and match more. This way, the number of pairs grows. Also, when my “mind is right” I will just spend a few hours and match feathers particularly when I have new skins or molted feathers I haven’t had before.
I hope you understand that every facet of what we do as tyers of fully dressed flies is important. If we slack off on any one, the quality of your flies will show it be it with lack luster feathers, lumpy floss, crooked ribs or rough heads. You will know it and those who look at your flies will too. Still, as I always stress, tie to the best of your ability and have fun with it. It’s just a hobby and hobbies oughtn’t be work.
Happy Trails!
Ronn
Medium & large pairs
Small pairs
This week’s typing tip is in response to a question by Hatches reader, Nick S. from Boise, ID. Nick wanted to know if we had any suggestions for a small, lightweight fly tying vise to use streamside, or on backcountry fly-in/ hike-in fly fishing trips.
GLOBE PEQUOT ( THE LYONS PRESS, FALCON), November 1997
Binding Type: Hardcover
Retail Price: $16.95 at the Hatches Store
ISBN: 1-55821-067-9
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|  Hatches is an annual publication with a strong devotion to professional writing, beautiful photography and informative articles pertaining to both the artistic and practical aspects of fly tying. Each issue features 13 featured articles that span a massive 96 pages.
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