Hair comes in all shapes and sizes, from deer, elk, and moose, to calf body, caribou and antelope. Professional tier Charlie Craven helps us sort the good from the bad. Excerpted from Charlie Craven's Basic Fly Tying (Headerwater Books/Stackpole, August 2008, 264 pages).

SELECTING THE RIGHT HAIR for a fly is one of the hallmarks of an accomplished fly tier. After years of tying with all sorts of hair, you will start to develop a sense of how different types react on the hook when you apply thread tension.

For our purposes here, I will talk about hair from deer, elk, and moose, and calf body hair. Caribou and antelope both have useable hair for fly tying, but I think the only ones who find this stuff useful are the caribou and antelope. These hairs tend to be soft and have mostly broken tips, rendering them useless for wings and collars. While these soft hairs do spin nicely, I find nice thick deer hair to be much better for spinning. A little more skill may be involved in spinning deer rather than antelope and caribou, but the result is more durable and certainly looks cleaner to my eye.

Hair and Tip Characteristics

While deer, elk, and moose hairs float well, they are not hollow like a drinking straw. Instead, they are cellular in nature, more like a piece of cork inside of a drinking straw. The differences in texture between different types of hairs results from a combination of the hair's diameter and wall thickness, sometimes referred to as the hardness of the hair. The outside wall thickness determines how much the hair can be compressed with the thread and the degree to which it flares on the hook. Thicker walls prevent the hair from being completely compressed under thread pressure or just don't compress as much as thinner-walled hairs. Thicker walls also make the finished fly more durable.   -READ MORE-

Types of Hair

Elk Hair

Elk hair is perhaps the most useable of all hairs for fly tying. Whether from a bull, cow, or yearling elk, this versatile hair has a beautiful range of colors. I use elk in every application that I can, because it is so commonly available and generally durable and of good quality. There are textural and quality differences between the hair from a bull, cow, or yearling elk, and I will try to explain them here.

Natural Bull Elk

Natural bull elk hair is lighter in color and slightly longer than cow or yearling elk hair. While this hair is hollow and buoyant, the wall thickness near the tips prevents this hair from flaring much.This thick wall makes the hair durable, and it is my hair of choice for many downwing patterns like the Elk Hair Caddis. This is a hard hair, particularly near the tips, but as you get closer to the butt ends of the hair it gains inside diameter and flares well along its base. Its longer length limits it to larger-than average flies. A good piece of bull elk hair should have beautiful tips that taper to short, abrupt points. When stacked, the dark tips form a striking band of color on wings. Bull elk hair has a slightly smaller outside diameter than cow elk hair but a thicker outside diameter than yearling elk.  -READ MORE-

Moose Body Hair

There was a time when moose body hair was all the rage for dry fly tails on patterns like Wulffs and Humpys. I have replaced moose body hair with moose hock for my tailing applications and expect most other good tiers have also. Moose body hair is much longer than moose hock and is considerably bigger in diameter. Moose body hair is at best a pretty even mix of white and black hairs, and at worst consists of hair that is white from the base up to about the halfway point where it then turns black.The butt ends of moose body hair are thick and spin like deer hair. These days, I most commonly see moose body used in steelhead dry flies because of its large diameter, mottled coloration, and ease of procurement. My biggest issue with moose body hair is that the tips are often ragged and split, making them useless as tails on the perfect flies I strive for. Aside from the less-than-adequate tips, the larger overall diameter of this hair causes it to flare more than I like, even when I use just the very tips of the hair.

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photo by Charlie Craven
Hair bugs like this are just one of the many ways to use up a deer hide.