One of the most important things to a choosy trout is the one thing my close-up pictures can't show: motion. Fly tyers imitate motion by using lively materials, and fly anglers imitate it with subtle rod-work, but both need to understand how the real critters move.
Most of these were shot long ago with an ancient digital camera, but I'll be adding higher-quality material this year.
I shot a picture every twenty seconds for a few hours as the sunlight faded over the Alaska Range above Black Rapids, and compressed them into this time lapse. It's amazing how much the mountains directly affect the clouds, and I never really appreciated it until I saw them in motion like this.
This video shows just how blizzard-like the Hexagenia limbata hatch can be. I only wish my digital camera had had respectable video capability back in 2005.
The Namekagon is not known as a Hex hatch river, for good reason: the hatch is extremely rare and localized, and there are often few if any trout where the Hexes are. During this trip I caught nothing and heard no risers, but it was still a memorable night out in the middle of nowhere.
Caddisfly larvae of this family can easily leave and re-enters their cases. I caught two of them playing musical chairs or something with this one... funny!
In mid-January I visited a spot where a heavily spring-fed tributary feeds into a river without much as much spring flow, creating an area of (in the winter) warmer water where hundreds of brookies were stacked up.
The video quality's as lousy as in all my early videos, but it's still amazing to see so many brook trout in such a small spot.
Dragonfly nymphs propel themselves through the water with a miniature jet engine, taking water in below their mouths and shooting it out their back ends. You can see the ripples from the jet out this one's back in this video.