The Ultimate Fly Tying Hackle Feather Guide

Fly tying hackle is a feather, usually from a chicken, wrapped or tied onto a hook to float a fly, give it movement, or suggest legs and a collar. Stiff, web-free rooster capes and saddles float dry flies, while soft, webby hen feathers and schlappen move underwater. For most tyers, the right first buy is a Bronze-grade dry fly cape or half cape, plus one soft feather for whatever they tie below the surface.

The wall of hackle in a fly shop is one of the more expensive places to guess. The packaging talks about grades, necks, saddles and genetics, and none of it tells you what you need for the flies you actually tie. This guide does that.

It builds on Chicken Parts: All About Hackle Feathers, the guest post Mary S. Kuss wrote for this blog in February 2017. Mary's tour of the bird is still worth your time. What follows is the buyer's side of the same subject: what a grade tells you, how to size a feather, and which one to reach for by fly type.

Because a feather's structure decides what it does on a hook, and you cannot tie your way around that.

A feather has a central stem, with barbs branching off it. Those barbs carry smaller branches called barbules; where barbules interlock, they hold the barbs together as a smooth surface. On many rooster hackles, that webbing is concentrated toward the base. Farther out, the barbs are more separate and stiff, giving the feather its familiar dry-fly profile.

That difference matters. Stiff, separate barbs spread around the hook and help support a dry fly at the surface. Webbier feathers have a more connected surface and tend to retain more water. Whiting Farms sets its baseline for a retail dry-fly feather at more than 85% web-free, along with a supple quill, no twist and dense barbing. Hen hackle does not meet that dry-fly benchmark; its softer, webby structure is useful on subsurface flies, where it moves with the water.

So quality in hackle only means something once you know the job. A feather that makes a poor dry fly collar can make a very good Woolly Bugger. As one reader pointed out under Mary's original post, a wide, webby barnyard feather is good quality if wide and webby is what your fly needs.

Start with where the fly will fish.

• Floating flies generally need rooster. Dry fly rooster hackle is bred for stiff barbs, long supple quills and high barb density. More barbs per turn means a fuller collar from fewer wraps.
• Sinking flies generally want hen. Hen hackle is soft and webby. It takes on water, and its fibers move with the current, which is the point of a soft hackle or wet fly.

Two exceptions are worth knowing, because they explain a lot of the range. Rooster does not automatically mean stiff: schlappen comes from a rooster and is wide and webby, and Whiting's American Rooster Saddle is bred with webby, tapered feathers for streamer, saltwater and steelhead flies. And hen does not always mean subsurface: feather tips from a hen cape make good upright wings on dry flies. The part of the bird and the breeding line matter as much as the sex of the chicken.

If you are chasing a floating problem rather than buying, see why your dry flies keep sinking.

Schlappen and Spey get lumped together, and many tyers use the words interchangeably. They are not quite the same thing. Schlappen refers to broad, soft feathers from a rooster; Spey describes a style of fly and the hackle used to dress it. Whiting's Spey hackle is a selectively bred rooster line developed as a heron-feather substitute.

Coq de Leon is the oldest of the lot. Tom Whiting describes it as the oldest known chicken bred specifically for fly tying feathers, with written records in Spain going back some 500 years. For a modern tailing option from an ordinary rooster, the Metz Hackle Tailing Bundle uses the stiff feathers from the outer edges of a cape.

A cape buys you range. A saddle buys you length and consistency. Everything else follows from that.

The practical sequence for most tyers looks like this.

• Start with a cape or half cape in your most-used color. Grizzly and brown are the obvious first picks.
• Use half capes for colors you tie less often. The Whiting Dry Fly 1/2 Cape, Bronze has the same breeding and the same size spread. It suits a Dyed Coachman Brown for the odd Royal Wulff better than a full cape does.
• Add a saddle when one size starts disappearing. A cape that has gone bald at size 14 is telling you to buy the Whiting Dry Fly Saddle, Bronze or its half saddle.

Less than the label suggests, and something different at each company. The common assumption is that a higher grade means a better feather. At Whiting, that is mostly wrong.

Grades judge the whole pelt. Four things drive the assessment:

• Barb density: how many barbs per length of stem, and so how few turns a full collar takes.
• Stem: how fine and supple the quill is, and whether it wraps without twisting.
• Sizing: how uniform the barbs are along a feather, and how wide a range of sizes the pelt covers.
• Yield: how many usable feathers there are and how long they run, which comes down to how many flies you get.

Whiting says every dry-fly feather that reaches retail clears the same baseline described above. If a pelt does not, it is not sold at retail. Grade then sorts the pelts that pass, using more than 25 factors, including usable feather length, uniformity, barb stiffness, size range, stem condition, feather quantity and color consistency. A densely feathered pelt with a wide size range and long usable feathers grades high.

In practice, the biggest difference you will feel is yield. Whiting Bronze saddles are sold as enough to tie at least 500 flies, and half saddles at least 250. Retailers quoting Whiting's grading figures put a full saddle at about 800 flies for Silver and about 1,100 for Gold. A cape is harder to reduce to one number because its feathers vary so much; J. Stockard describes the average feather in a Bronze cape as tying about one fly.

Bronze is Whiting's value grade. Tom Whiting has described it as "adequate for 90% of most tiers' needs." Unless you burn through hundreds of flies in one color, that is the place to start. If budget is the deciding factor, the Pro Grade cape offers more feathers in sizes 14 to 16 and fewer at the small end. For product details, see Dry Fly Cape, Pro Grade

Metz uses its own grading labels. Umpqua lists Grade 1, Grade 2, Signature and Legacy for Metz saddles, but its product information does not explain how those labels rank against one another. Umpqua publishes no minimum fly counts for these grades, so there is no direct way to line them up against Whiting's.

The more useful information is what the feather is for. Metz describes its saddle hackle as long and softer, and aims it at larger dry flies, streamers and Woolly Buggers. That is a different target from a Whiting Bronze dry fly saddle, as the comparison shows.

The takeaway: a grade only compares pelts within one brand's line. Silver does not map onto Signature. Choose the format and the job first, then use the grade to decide how much yield you want to pay for.

Palmering wants a long feather, a natural taper and a quill that will not crack on the way down the shank. The Metz Bugger Bunch is pre-sized for hooks 8, 10 and 12, using feathers of about 6 inches from the base of a rooster cape, with fine barbs and a supple quill. It comes in nine colors, including Grizzly Olive, Grizzly Burnt Orange, Grizzly Claret and Grizzly Purple. The Whiting Bugger Pack does the same job on long saddle feathers, for size 10 and up.

If you want more movement and a more mottled look, wrap a Montana Fly Barred Schlappen feather instead. It is broader and webbier than bugger hackle, so the result is a fuller fly.

Here you want a feather that collapses and moves. The Ewing Dyed Hen Cape gives you soft, webby feathers in colors such as Golden Olive, Coachman Brown and the blue duns, plus barred grizzly versions. Its shaped tips also tie in cleanly as hen-tip wings on dries. For longer feathers in sizes 12 to 16, the Whiting Hen Saddle is the alternative, and India Hen Back adds a mottled option for collars and legs.

A good place to put any of them to work is a Sulphur Soft Hackle. Our older guide to soft hackle hooks and materials goes further on the style.

The usual rule for a standard dry fly is barbs about 1.5 times the hook gap. Tyers work anywhere from about 1 to 2 times the gap depending on the style, with bushy, heavily hackled flies at the shorter end. It is a starting point, not a law. Too long and the fly tips and looks overdressed. Too short and the hook settles into the film.

There are two ways to check.

• By eye on the hook. Mount the hook, strip the base of the feather, and bend it around the shank so the barbs stand out. Compare them with the gap. This takes seconds, costs nothing, and measures against the hook you are actually using.
• With a gauge. Bend the quill around the pin and read where the barb tips land on the scale. The J. Stockard Hook and Hackle Gauge is the economical option, reading most reliably on feathers larger than size 16. The Stonfo Hackle Gauge reads hook sizes 22 to 4, and the Griffin Hook Hackle Gauge and Hareline's anodized gauge are also options.

Gauges are useful for sorting feathers quickly, but they do not all agree, and hook gaps vary between models. Measure the first feather against the real hook, then let the gauge keep you consistent for the rest of the batch.

Pre-sized products remove the question altogether, which is much of the appeal of 100 Packs and the Bugger Bunch.

Genetic hackle means feathers from birds selectively bred, over generations, for fly tying. There is no lab in the story. It started in backyards.

In the 1960s, good dry-fly feathers were still hard to find, and many tyers relied on capes imported from India and China. The foundations of modern genetic hackle were being laid by then. Catskill tyer Harry Darbee bred birds through the 1940s and 1950s and shared his stock widely. Minnesota lawyer Andy Miner took it further and gave away chickens and eggs to whoever asked. Tom Whiting calls him the "Johnny Appleseed" of the hackle world. Many of the major producers that followed drew on this stock.

Three names on today's packaging carry the rest of the story.

• Metz. Buck Metz received 144 eggs from Miner in 1972 and went on to become the first major commercial hackle producer, with purified color lines that made shades such as ginger and badger reliably available. Umpqua Feather Merchants bought the operation in 1995.
• Whiting. Working separately in Oregon, Henry Hoffman bought barred bantams in 1965 and selected his sires by tying flies with their feathers. He produced the first true dry fly saddle hackle. Dr. Tom Whiting bought the line in 1989, later added the Hebert/Miner stock, and also developed separate lines for wet flies, Spey and Coq de Leon.
• Ewing. Doug Ewing started in 1989 with white and grizzly birds from Joe Keough, then spent years building a line of natural colors. The range today includes the Ewing Dry Fly Cape, with sizes from 4 down to 22, and the hen capes covered above.

Why it changed tying comes down to three things. Saddles became dry fly feathers, so a single feather could tie several flies, and many tyers stopped depending on necks. As Mary noted in her post, that turned the old habit of buying necks for dries on its head. Small sizes became routine rather than rare. And dense, stiff barbs on fine, flexible quills meant fuller collars from fewer turns, on a smaller hook, with less fight at the vise.

There was a side effect, also flagged in Mary's post: lines selected for dry-fly hackle did not supply every type of large feather and tailing material tyers wanted. That is why the range also includes purpose-specific bugger hackle and separate tailing bundles, and why this guide compares feathers by the job they do.