Male Speaker: The next step that we'll talk about a technique is applying a Herl Butt to a Classic Salmon fly. There are times when Herl is used at the butt of the fly to bury the tying spot of the tail and tag, at other times as referred to as a joint when it becomes the connection between two different body parts. There's a lots of ostrich herl on the market. The majority of it is the long fibered, long flued material that is appropriate for Woolly Buggers and in Trap Flies, but the tier should look for, probably what is immature ostrich feathers, that have a very fine flue in order to create the butts. They should become packed and dense when they are completed.

I think it's important to understand the structure of these individual fibers and you can see that this feather has been used quiet extensively. If you look in cross section at the ostrich fiber, each one, the flue actually comes off one side of the feather and there's flat barb, if you will, that has no flue on it. And the important thing about tying this material in, want to tie it in and wrap it such that the bare portion of the barb is leading in forward and the flue comes off the back. If the flue is in front, and we wrap forward, we will wrap over it and defeat the purpose of the compact dense butt.

An important concept in tying an herl is to have a segment of the barb that has been stripped off the flue. By doing that, the flue will also, will always lie in the proper position and won't tend twist around the hook shank. What I'm going to do now is take my nail and strip off this material four or perhaps three-eighths quarter than inch. Remember that we tied in our tail and the thread is back at the, in beginning of the tail right above the end of the silk tag. We'll take and lay the bare barb against the hook shank, catch it with a loop of thread, wrap the thread forward in touching turns, binding down the stem of the Ostrich herl which you can see here.

Even with that preparation, sometimes the flue wants to twist or rather the barb ones to twist, that can be overcome by simply bending the feather against the bodkin or the feather tip or the scissor tip and then begin to wrap.

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Catch the tip of the ostrich herl with a wrap of thread and bind it down. One thing to remember is that the wraps of thread underneath the herl butt need to be uniform and even such that the, there's not a such an abrupt slope that the barb slips forward. We want these fibers, these flues to be compact and dense and lie one against the other. And it may mean adjusting, putting some extra thread wraps underneath such that the barb doesn't fall off forward, leaving a gap between one wrap of ostrich herl and the one preceding.

At this point, we can go ahead and cut the tag and tip ends of the ostrich herl before we proceed onto the body. That is an effective way of applying a dense black ostrich herl for a Classic Salmon fly or as a joint in a jointed body.