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.

The larger the inside diameter, or more air space you have in the center of the hair, the better it will float. Too much inside diameter, or air space, and the hair flares wildly. Thick hair (large outside diameter) with thin walls and lots of inside diameter like deer rump and body hair is great for spinning but hard to tame into a decent looking wing on a fly like an Elk Hair Caddis. Hairs with a thick wall and little inside diameter, like moose and elk hock, flare very little or not at all and are great for tailing dry flies because they are manageable and form a straight, stiff tail that supports the heavy hook bend without deforming.

When selecting hair for any fly with hair tips used as a wing or tail, choose hair with quickly tapering, short tips. These short-tipped hairs are more hollow (have a bigger inside diameter) toward their tips, providing air space and adding buoyancy to the finished fly. Long tips are typically dark-colored and solid, adding no floatation to the fly and making the hair harder to compress. Broken hair tips are absolutely unacceptable in my book, and I go to great lengths to avoid them. I always carefully remove any broken tips I see in a stacked bunch of hair before tying it to the hook.

All hair is good for something, but it may or may not be just right for what you have in mind. When you buy a new chunk of hair and sit down to tie with it, take stock of its attributes and perceived applications. When you find a piece that works wonderfully for this or that, write it on the back of the hide with a permanent marker. I have a whole box of hair labeled with things like "Stimi,""EHC" (Elk Hair Caddis),"Humpies," and "spinning hair." This labeling system keeps me from having to go through that trial and error each time I sit down to tie a new fly. Also, it's not a bad idea to leave a little hair left on the patch when you are running down to the end. Bring the remaining chunk of hair with you when you go to the fly shop to buy a new piece to compare the old with the new to match up the color and textures. Eventually, you will be able to select hair by looking it over and feeling it in your fingers, but until you have worked with a variety of different textures and consistencies, trial and error will be your best friend.

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.

Natural Cow Elk

A good piece of cow elk hair is a fly-tying staple. Cow elk hair is slightly darker and shorter than bull elk hair but also slightly bigger in outside diameter. The texture and color of a good piece of cow elk hair is similar to that of deer body hair, but the wall of the cow elk hair is generally much thicker. Cow elk can be used on patterns like the Elk Hair Caddis, Stimulator, and the Humpy and produces tough, durable flies with a darker tone than if you tied them with yearling elk hair. The overall diameter of the hair is bigger than both the bull and yearling hair, and I find this hair a bit large to use on smaller flies. Like the bull elk hair, a good piece of cow elk has tips that taper quickly to sharp points. Short tips make wings that end all in the same place and create a stark edge rather than longer wispy tips that result in a wing that just sort of fizzles out near the tips. Cow elk hair flares more than bull elk hair.

Yearling Elk

I have fallen in love with yearling elk hair. Yearling elk epitomizes what I search for in a piece of hair to use for wings on flies of all sizes. The soft texture coupled with the quickly tapered tips makes this hair great for nearly all winging applications.The somewhat thinner wall thickness and thinner overall diameter makes this hair easy to compress on the hook, yet it is still thick enough to keep the hair from flaring out of bounds when I apply thread tension. Yearling elk hair is longer than cow elk and often as long as bull, making it useable for a range of fly sizes. The tips of a good piece of yearling elk hair taper quickly to a point just as a good piece of cow or bull hair will, forming clean color bands along the tips of hair wings. I use yearling elk on patterns like the Humpy and Stimulator, as its thin wall and diameter allows me to anchor it to the hook and completely compress it with heavy thread tension. Hair that compresses completely on the shank creates far less bulk than hairs with thicker walls. A great piece of yearling elk hair inspires me with its hidden potential, and I have been known to hoard the good stuff to excess. I am a bad man.

Elk and Moose Hock

Elk and moose hock come from the animals' legs and is a fine hair with sharp tips and very little inside diameter. This solid texture prevents the hair from flaring and makes it great for tailing dry flies. The hard texture of this hair makes it easy to use and durable and resistant to bending and breaking. I have even used this hair for tailing on nymphs, particularly on patterns that have sparse two- or three-fiber tails. Moose hock has a slightly bigger outside diameter than elk hock and is generally much darker (dark brown to jet black) in color. Near the top of the moose's leg, you can find patches of hock hair that have silvery tips, which makes great tails on little flies. Elk hock is generally a bit more mottled than moose and has a chocolate-brown color with tan tips. These are both beautiful hairs and are the only hair I use to tail dry flies like the Humpy and Royal Wulff.

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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