Tying Traditional Soft Hackle Patterns with Porcupine Quills

[paparex]

As I had posted before under Mearn Quail, I got some porcupine quills for the Mearns Quail feathers. I tied a stonefly nymph and thought about how to tie soft hackles. First let me apologize for the quality of the photos. Improvement to come....
I selected out a few quills that were about the width as silk thread. The small one is on a US quarter.

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As you can see the quills vary in diameter. They are somewhat oval. I then took the small quill and flattened it by pressing the quill between my thumbnail and forefinger nail and pulled the quill through. I started it at the tail end and wrapped it with touching turns. It is very similar to tying in and wrapping biots.

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Prototype: Mearn's and Pig
Hook: Size 12
Thread: 12/0 Yellow
Body: Flattened Natural Porcupine Quill
Hackle: Mearn's Quail
Head: Thread

I think it approximates a Partridge and Yellow in hue and structure. Now I will dye the other selected quills yellow, and see if the end product looks like I think it will. Then, out to fish it! I will wait until after the Labor Day weekend to fish it. My favorite stretch for Partridge and Yellow is in the middle of a campground that closes the day after Labor Day. Let the water rest from swimmers, rock throwing and tubing and I expect a great few hours.

Since the porcupine quills are hollow, I tied the black end (the point or barb) onto the hook and did not trim it off. I then wrapped the quill up and tied the quill off tightly at the head. Hopefully, with the hollow center, it will float at the surface.

[Mataura mayfly]

Nice work.
Some very nice forum members have sent some of those quills over. I admit to having had a play around with them, but my results were not as nice.....yet.
Well done.

[Kelly L.]

Hard to make it out from the photo, but the fly looks real good to me.

[William Anderson]

Rex, I forgot to get back to this one. I've tied quite a bit with the guard hairs and there are a range of prickly spines that make up a continuum between the 6"guard hair and the 2-3" quill. Those in between have some nice color/tonal shifts and also vary in the degree of hollow ness. I'll try to link some images later. Nice post. Sorry I'm just getting back to it. Curious if you have tested how they float. Drop that one in a glass and let us know. I've seen some cool white flies and coffin flies tied with quills as an extended body. I prefer the hairs on spinners. It's a fun material to fool around with.

[paparex]

I don't have any guard hairs to work with...just the quills. In the last two years I haven't come across a porcupine roadkill that I could harvest. Except that one I stopped for between Park City and Heber City. My wife said something about my desire to live alone or something similar so that one probably got picked up by the animal control officer. We had several that would haunt our backyard before we moved to a condo. They would often get stuck climbing over the fence.

I look forward to your pictures and have sent my flies to a friend for better photography. Then I'll welcome your comments on my new found hobby

[William Anderson]

Rex, I have a couple of patterns I've tied using the porcupine guard hairs on this page.

http://www.williamsfavorite.com/soft-ha ... llery.html

send me a pm with your mailing address and I'll get some guard hairs headed your way to fool around with. The bodies are much more spinner like, but I've fished well with these soft hackles ever since I met that poor porcupine.

w

[Kelly L.]

The quills can be just for looks, or used for their floating properties underneath the body of a fly, and unseen.