Hare's Mask

[Traditionalist]

Your mask should look something like this;

As you can see there is a large range of colours here. The textures of these hairs also vary depending on where you take them from.
The ears etc are on square graph paper as I am working on a system for describing hair types and locations, but I am not finished yet.


OK. The mask has a number of more or less defined areas with specific types and colours of hair.

On either side of the nose, there are areas of reddish brown hair with very little underfur. Moving up the side of the mask, this changes to a light buff colour. As one moves further up, the hair tips become darker with a well defined dark brown to black band, and blue grey underfur.

Between the eyes and on the forehead is hair with light yellowish tips and a dark base.

At the base and between the ears is the "poll" this is a light reddish brown with pale tips, with underfur of the same colour. This is the same colour and texture as buff opossum fur.

At the base of the ears you have soft fur with light, often almost white fur with a varying length of dark base. Moving up the ear itself you have short dark hair with light tips. This is the hare recommended for the hare´s ear nymph. You can remove this by pinching it off with your thumb and finger nail. The whole side of the ear is covered with this hair.

So, that very roughly covers it. I have been working on an article about this for quite some time, but I don´t know when I will finish it. You can blend any of these furs together in pinches, or you can use each type of hair alone, or you can separate the guard hair and the underfur and use it separately. There are many possible blend combinations. I have covered about twenty of these "standard" blends so far, but of course they are practically infinite.

Many people simply shave the mask and chuck the result in a blender, But this is a terrible waste of possibilities and the resulting blend, though quite excellent for some nymphs and wet flies, contains a very large percentage of underfur, and is thus less suitable for quite a few things, including dry flies. You can dress dozens of completely different flies using a mask and ears. And you can also control the properties of those flies.

For guard hair wings and the like, body fur is better simply because it is a lot longer and easier to handle. even short body guard hair is at least an inch long, which is quite ample for even the largest flies.

The guard hair from various locations also differs in colour according to location, and much of it also differs in colour along its own length. There may be three or more clearly defined colours or shades of colour on a single guard hair, If you want a specific colour, then just cut the colours off that you require, and put the others aside for something else.

The finished article also has a cross reference to the flies which may be dressed with the various hair, and why it is used. But I am still working on that, and the project is on another disk on another machine, so I can´t give you any of it yet.