When I laid my hands on a couple of bunches of Coq de Leon, Pardo hackles, I more or less stopped using fibetts. I liked tough, old, plain fibetts, but to my eye barred, flecked, subtly coloured Coq de Leon just looked and still looks better as a split tail. However, I may be in the process of reconsidering that habit.

I have Barred Fibbets here, in three shades – White, Pale Yellow, Silver Dun. On all three the bars are black and have been applied using some sort of printing process (as far as I can tell). Compared to plain fibetts the difference is striking, these colours and the barred shading are pleasingly subtle. Pick out a pair of fibetts and these are very fine and look ‘natural’. Barred Fibbets look delicate but are tough, far tougher, than feather barbs. Thinking about the tail of a dry fly, I like the Pardo feather because the barring and shading looks more natural, plain fibetts look a little sterile (if you can see the damned things at all!). Barred Fibbets seem to address most, if not all, my reasons for preferring Pardo. I freely admit my preferences here are about what looks good to me. I still like Pardo feathers, but will be using them less thanks to these.