Martyn White | Thursday, 8 June 2023
Bad news for me this week. There's been a fish kill on my local lake. Hundreds, maybe thousands of fish of various species, all dead. I'm not sure what caused it, the dead fish turned up after the typhoon last week and regardless of the reasons it's going to put the lake out of commission for a while. Until I get some news on why it happened, I'll be keeping clear of the system and fishing elsewhere. There are other places to go, and different species to target but it's a blow.
Aside from that, I've found an excellent entomology resource for fly fishing & fly tying on YouTube; the Tanyptera Project. Here's their description of the project.
"The Tanyptera Project is a 7.5 year initiative funded by the Tanyptera Trust and hosted by National Museums Liverpool. Two full time project staff are based in the Entomology Department of World Museum, Liverpool. The project is dedicated to promoting the study and conservation of insects and other invertebrates in the Lancashire and Cheshire region of the United Kingdom. Part of the project involves runnning identification, field skills, curation, and recording workshops. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic we started to run free invertebrate identification webinars. Through this channel, we have shared those sessions."
They have high quality images and full descriptions of all the insects that are or could be of interest to us as fly fishers. They are a bit long and go into more detail than most of us need, but cover everything from habitat, breeding habits, other behaviours and crucially sizes in millimetres so there's no need to guess at hook sizes. It is UK specific, but there's a lot of overlap with other Northern European countries and probably for similar species in North America.
Plus if you are more generally interested in insects and other creatures, they have all kinds of videos on the channel that are just as good. The link below is to their main channel page, but you can easily search for a specific insect group.
Aside from that, I've found an excellent entomology resource for fly fishing & fly tying on YouTube; the Tanyptera Project. Here's their description of the project.
https://www.youtube.com/@thetanypteraproject8207