Ready-tied Cock Pheasant Knotted Tails and Daddy Legs and Hopper Legs from Veniard

About 13cm section (5 inches) from a cock pheasant tail. Individual fibres on both sides of the stem are knotted twice.

Sections of cock pheasant tail with knots tied in each individual fibre. In my opinion, a simply brilliant product – up there with the convenience of sliced bread, tea bags and fleece. Sure I can knot pheasant fibres, a fiddly and time-consuming job – but this is just so wonderfully quick and easy. Pull a three fibres straight, cut and place along the side of a hook, repeat with three more for the other side, then finish the fly with a hackle or whatever. This procedure is as opposed to tying two knots in each fibre, one at a time, six knots for the near side of the fly – maybe including a dropped a fibre, so eight knots for this side. Then repeat for the far side. In the time it takes to knot all those legs, I swear I can finish two flies.

Tying anything with trailing legs these are simply ideal, the lengths and distance between knots varies – so the compulsive among us will have something to fuss about. Or simply work from one end of a stem to the other – adding a small, but honestly interesting, potential trigger to a wet or ‘damp’ fly.

Hopper Legs

These come cut from the tail in wee packets, a pair of fibres, knotted once. The idea is to make a stouter leg, more like a grasshopper, maybe a beetle, or even a hawthorn, any bug with a thicker leg. Or simply tie in one pair working on the assumption that fish are worse at maths than a typical modern teenager.

Daddy Legs

Again, cock pheasant tail barbs are cut from the stem, a single fibre is knotted twice. The packet I have is similar to the Knotted Tail but the barbs tend to be long and the knots are wider apart – saying that, there are some quite like this on the knotted tail. For tying full, dry, spread-legged Daddies I’d opt for these.

All three are available in natural pheasant colour – a great start and suits about 90% of the tying uses I have for knotted pheasant barbs. Hopper Legs also come dyed black and claret – both useful. Knotted Tail comes dyed black, claret, red and orange. All the dyed colours are dyed over the natural tail markings, so are fairly subtle.

From: Veniard stockists
Prices: Cock Pheasant Knotted Tails – about £6.00 per piece
Daddy Legs – about £3.00 per pack.
Hopper Legs – about £3.00 per pack.