tjm

Here are a few of those- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfZWE7mqrZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeU3Ivm_M1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_On9RFqjFI

Whoa, a glass of tap water?

If I have to order on line I want it delivered to my porch. I can drive to two fly pro shops as easy as driving to a BPS. I do buy socks and rain wear at BPS.

You are carrying in more than think, but doing it in smaller increments a small bag here and a small bag there. A container with the lid off is two pieces of trash, a meat pack turns into the foam plate plus the wrapping film plus the blood pad that separates the meat from the foam tray; or three pieces of thrash. Plus the bag that carried the package is a fourth piece of trash.

Buying the good line at BPS is an idea, but the BPS near me never has any lines in stock that I would chose. Occasionally they have tippet.

Wonder if a living bug doesn't have oil in it. The number of times I got a rise to those slicks makes me think trout like them. I get by with Albolene when I use any floatant. The chemist that wrote about substituting for various floatants and desiccants recommended this or this as being the right form of silica to float stuff and as being the same as hydrophobic powders - Frogs Fanny, or Loon Outdoors Blue Ribbon Floatant. And for desiccant to dry the fly before adding the Frog Fanny he recommend silica gel which is a solid desiccant that absorbs water. It is commonly packed with electronic equipment to keep it dry. He said to get Top Ride mix the two together or to get Frog Fanny just use fumed silica. A theory is that Frog Fanny on a wet fly repels the water into the material and keeping it wet. I'm guessing that squeezing the fly dry is about as good as shaking it in powders.

I'd spend the BPS cards on clothing which is what BPS does best and buy the rod and reel on eBay or Amazon. Or your local Independent Fly Pro Shop. The Redington Classic Trout in 8'6" #4 is listed on Amazon at $119 and at BPS at $170. Classic Trout always gets good reviews and is often suggested as a starter rod that you can use for many years. A similar TFO rod Pro2 on Amazon is $133.22 and on BPS at $189.99. You might not want that size but the price difference is common. I'd probably pick a 8'6" or 9' in #5 for the kind fishing you describe. Reel might be a Maxcatch or Piscifun <$50 buy a line size or two larger than the line to be used. Line to me is the most important part of all this and I'd stay traditional tapers in standard weights and spend about $70-$80. But having expressed those thoughts, the only new fly stuff I've bought in years is fly line and tippet material, so the repute of these rods is hearsay. I have casts my son's BPS rods and if I was looking they'd be last on my list. I've some great reviews of the Maxcatch fly rods in the $50 range too recently.

I bought a car wash "chamois leather" (lambskin I presume" 20-30 years ago and the same small piece has been squeeze drying my flies since. Tied a few shammy worms with strips of it but never caught a fish on one. I have dried flies with pads of Bounty when I didn't have the leather and that works too. I imagine the mushroom pads are a status sign with some or just a sign. Kinda like the $200 finger nail clippers, no doubt both work but I can't convince myself that they are necessary. I've yet to try fancy Frog Fanny. Having read too many British novels as a youth things called "fanny" always strike me as a little off colour. And I've always thought a "fanny pack" should be worn in front like a sporran.

I don't recall ever reading that hare hair was hollow. Your foot doesn't look much like the pair I have, mine show coarse guard hair with dense under fur. That long wispy stuff looks more like what I got as Icelandic sheep. I like the hi-vis color though. What dye turned it that shade? surely not a blue tint? For the Usual I took the clipping from between the toes, pulled the under fur out of the hair and saved it for dubbing. Similar to combing the fur out of deer hair. For a small caddis I might take the clipping from the leg or the rear of the foot where it would be finer textured but possibly less buoyant. the clipping needs be very small ime. I'm not at all sure that dipping a pinch of fur has any relevance to a finished fly, it's not a test that has ever occurred to me, maybe I'll try that some time with various materials.

I don't think water resistance in natural furs and feathers is due to any oils remaining on them through processing. Rather it is because of the cell structure of the hair, fur or feather itself. As an example your finger nails and skin are both keratin, but the structure of the nails make them more resistant water and wear than the skin is. Animals that live in the water have fur that is more water resistant than animals that live in the desert, or even in the woods. Cut a strip of beaver back or otter back and a strip of rabbit back and just chuck them into a tub of water until the become saturated, which soaks up more water? I've never done this but my money is on the bunny getting wet first. It's protein structure that makes mink shiny not oil. Go for the myth busting. Start with the contrary facts and let the believers prove the myth true. it'll be an interesting read. Add "dead drift" and "drag free drift" to your list. And "fly rod line rating".

that's what old Pliny meant by becoming sexy.

I confused hares and rabbits as being only native to Spain and Portugal, changed that.

one of the pictures I saw depicted well dressed ladies of some long gone time "hunting rabbits" with one lady holding a cage over an entrance to the warren and the other lady releasing a ferret into an opposite entrance. That is sport, right?

They have tiny hooves, I think so probably easy to pick out of a bucket of rabbit feet. Truthfully I went looking for foot comparisons and was astonished at the number of species there are. Kinda got caught up in the collection of info on them all. There some foot sizes given for some species on a few of the dozens of sites I looked at but not enough to establish any comparisons. My thoughts were initially that like @BilletHeadsaid any of us could pick a snowshoe foot out of rabbit feet by the foot size and hair/fur quality differences, then when trying to confirm that, i started to wonder more and more. It's a wild hare chase. Other trivia- ''Pliny the Elder advocated a diet of hare as a means of increasing sexual attractiveness and also claimed that hare meat had the power to cure sterility." Mad as a March hare relates to hares boxing during their mating season. " An image of three running hares formed into a circle has been found in medieval churches, cathedrals and even inns across Britain. A floor tile dated to around 1400, found in the nave of Chester Cathedral, depicts a trio of hares separated by trefoil-shaped vegetation. Joined at their tips, their ears form a triangle, each hare apparently with two ears, though the tile artist has drawn only three in total." European hares rabbits were native only to the Iberian peninsula but as far back as the Roman days were introduced throughout the Continent and into Briton for the hunt.

Probably. I thought so at the time but they were always 20-30 yards away and moving. I never saw their feet up close. Locals in New England called them "swampers" and they did live in wet areas. There is a chance they were just big yellow rabbits. I've probably seen more jackrabbits than all other leporid species put together, since I saw two population explosion/decline cycles in Idaho and Oregon high deserts. As I remember them they had bigger feet than any domestic that I have seen I got side tracked after posting the dog image, I had gathered some comparison about rabbits and bunnies, not much about the feet though- Typical hares length and weight- Whitetail jackrabbit 18-22 inches 5-10 pounds Blacktail jackrabbit 17-21" 3-7 pounds Snowshoe hare 13-18 inches 2-4 pounds -It has larger feet than the whitetail and blacktail jackrabbits. Antelope jackrabbit 19-21 inches 6-13 pounds European hare 25-27" 7-10 pounds Arctic hare 19 to 26 inches 6-15 pounds Alaska Hare 25" 10 pounds 30? species of cottontails, some of the more typical species- Swamp rabbit 17-20" 4-5 Pounds (a cotton tail) Eastern cottontail 14-19" 2-4 Pounds New England cottontail 14-19" 2-4 Pounds Marsh rabbits 17" 2-2.6 pounds Wild European rabbit 16" 2.6-4.4 pounds Domestic rabbits derived from European rabbit total about 106 breeds from dwarf to giant. At least 10 breeds weighing between 12-25 pounds. Given a large snowshoe weighs ~4#, I'd guess some of those domestic 12# plus bunnies must have feet just as big. There is overlap of ranges with snowshoe and other hares such as the Arctic, Alaska, and jackrabits, as well as with a few cottontails. "Snowshoe hares occur from Newfoundland to Alaska; south in the Sierra Nevada to central California; in the Rocky Mountains to southern Utah and northern New Mexico; and in the Appalachian Mountains to West Virginia. Populations in its southern range, such as in Ohio, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Virginia have been extirpated."

So you feel like you could find one or two "snowshoe" feet mixed with 98 "rabbit" feet? I'm not sure that's true, is it? "Snowshoe" is only a colloquial designation, so does it really have a legal standing? I don't know, interesting question. What if only DNA can determine the source species? I spent an hour or two researching "how to tell if my snowshoe hare foot is really snowshoe", "what is the difference between a "hare's foot" and a rabbit's foot", "where does a Hare's foot com from" and a dozen other such questions with basically zero results other than over all differences between the two animals. actually 50-60 different species from eleven different genera. 10 genera of rabbits and one of hares, but more species of hares than of rabbits. The tradition of a rabbit's foot being lucky seems to back thousands of years and was/is prevalent in Europe, China, and Africa, as well as in North and South America. The "rules of what makes it lucky seem to have been accumulated and codified in the early 1900s with at in a 1908 British advertisement of "rabbits’ feet imported from America being advertised as ‘the left hind foot of a rabbit killed in a country churchyard at midnight, during the dark of the moon, on Friday the 13th of the month, by a cross-eyed, left-handed, red-headed bow-legged Negro riding a white horse,’” An article on some of this. One of many. Thinking back to the late '50s and early '60s it seems to me that most of the rabbit foot charms and key rings found at gas stations and dime stores were front feet from white rabbits.

That may be the problem with yours sinking, it never was a snowshoe but came fro domestic meat rabbit. I've often wondered about the source of all those hare's masks and hare's feet. There are markets for wild killed squirrel tails, but I have never seen an ad for buying rabbit/hare feet or face. I don't recall ever studying the feet of the few rabbits I've dressed,so I'll have to take your word for that they are identical. I've tied a few Usuals with the feet I have, using only the toe hair, and they did float wonderfully and when wet a squeeze with the Chamois made them float again. And honestly that surprised me, when I bought the feet I did so cynically, thinking "who hunts enough snowshoes to supply all these fly shops." I have noticed that every "hare's mask" that I have seen displayed in fly shops in recent years only about half as big as the one I bought in the late '70s, so I assume they are not European hares either.

what has caused the shift from Turkey Vulture to Black Vulture? 30-35 years ago I had never seen a Black Vulture and now they are all I see.

I read on a fly tying forum that a guy used "Soft Scrub® with Bleach Cleanser" to lighten cream colored hare's foot. I never tried that, don't know how it really worked. You might use a bit of white poly yarn as a hot spot or over wing to make it easier to see, depending on the fly. If you want to get a good dye job though, go see the nearby hair salon, they are experts at that work., it will require lightening followed by toning with a blue/violet based tint, I think. A hairdresser would have the right bleaches and dyes for hair. And presumably the skills.

One year squirrels got our transformer fuse seven times in three months, never happened in the twenty years before and and only once in the three or four years since.

From- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1190840/ from sfgate.com

Mercury contamination is a thing.

It's a cumulative thing where phytoplankton absorb the mercury and zooplankton eat them and are in turn eaten by small fish who get eaten by bigger fish, in the case of the top predators the older fish have been accumulating longer and therefore have more. I'd guess that if they had tested some large old catfish or bass that they would also be on the watch list. Virtually all fresh water fish have Mercury contamination at potential danger levels for pregnant gals who eat fish daily. But those limits are set by the EPA rather than by a health authority, so who knows if they mean anything.

All documents are "classified" unimportant stuff is classified and stamped as "Un-Classified" and only Top Secret or above is really monitored as I recall. I think we had "Confidential" and "Secret" stuff all over the office. As to why anything is classified, it goes back to "loose lips sink ships"; even trivial information lets the "enemy" build information profiles. From the politician's viewpoint everybody not on the reelection team is the "enemy".