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.
For the fly fisher seeking to catch more and bigger trout, fishing nymphs--patterns that mimic the larval stage of mayflies--can be a surefire approach. Nymphs: The Mayflies, the first volume in a totally revised edition of the 1973 original, is the singular authority on identifying the myriad species of mayfly larvae and tying imitations that will attract trout all across the country.
Author Ernest G. Schwiebert spent the last fifty years of his life traveling, fishing, and gathering information on scores of mayfly species across the country. The 1973 edition of Nymphs set forth his initial findings. Now in this wholly revised and expanded form, Schwiebert's last work offers the reader exacting details of every major mayfly species for the sake of identification, along with recipes for dozens of fly patterns to imitate them.
This new edition also contains numerous stories and anecdotes from Schwiebert's travels, some never set down in writing before, that further add to the understanding of how to choose, cast, and fish nymphs, and life.
After the mayfly family, detailed in Nymphs: The Mayflies, the fly fisher must know the caddisfly, stonefly, and midge populations just as well to catch trout that are keyed in on such insects. Nymphs: Caddisflies, Stoneflies, and Other Important Species gives the reader all the essential information about identifying individual species of these insects throughout their North American range, and then delves into detailed instructions for scores of artificial patterns to imitate them. Few books in fishing literature have focused so closely on so many individual species of the particular genera of aquatic insects in this volume.
And just as in Nymphs: The Mayflies, this book contains numerous stories and anecdotes from Schwiebert's travels that illuminate the selection and use of nymph patterns, and recount great days spent on the water as interpreted through one of the great minds of modern fly fishing.