Tiny Baetis mayflies are perhaps the most commonly encountered and imitated by anglers on all American trout streams due to their great abundance, widespread distribution, and trout-friendly emergence habits.
This wild-looking little thing completely puzzled me. At first I was thinking beetle or month larva, until I got a look at the pictures on the computer screen. I made a couple of incorrect guesses before entomologist Greg Courtney pointed me in the right direction with Psychodidae. He suggested a possible genus of Thornburghiella, but could not rule out some other members of the tribe Pericomini.
In about 35 years of doing this stuff, I've caught 3 tigers I'm pretty certain were wild. One was in a small Loyalsock trib, another was in a small Cameron County freestone with a strong wild BT pop and a healthy, but lesser wild ST pop. The third was last season in a Wisconsin Spring Creek. All were between 6-8" in length.
I'm inherently skeptical of the potential for wild ancestry in any tiger that runs into the size range of stocked catchables. But the Delaware is a huge system with a lot of tribs with pretty strong pops. of both BT and ST. And a wild tiger that made it down out of one of these smaller drinks into the bigger water would certainly have the forage at his disposal to grow to that sort of size. The D is certainly one of the more likely places to find such a fish.
Up the line, somebody asked:
>>Where in Wisconsin can we find Tigers...? I am guessing it is up north more but I haven't heard much about Tigers in Wisconsin. Any tips???>
A pretty fair number of the streams in the Central Sands region of the state have pretty fair mixed BT/ST pops and might produce some tigers.
Additionally, some streams in the Driftless Area are probably a lot more likely to produce such a fish now than they were when we moved out here 8 years ago. In the interim, WI-DNR has made a concerted effort to get wild ST started in quite a few of their high potency wild brown trout waters. They've been pretty successful, as near as I can tell. They use wild fingerlings and this seems to make a major difference in how likely a self-sustaining pop is to take off and prosper.
In any event, quite a few of the streams I regularly fish up there that were browns only are now mixed fisheries. With this comes the increased possibility of a wild tiger..
They fasten red (crimson red) wool around a hook, and fix onto the wool two feathers which grow under a cock’s wattles, and which in colour are like wax.
Radcliffe's Fishing from the Earliest Times,