Snowshoe hare feet ?

[fishinwrench]

3 hours ago, BilletHead said:

    They are good luck only if it is the left foot.

Those left feet weren't very lucky for the hare.

I've cleaned alot of rabbits in my day, and I'll bet'cha good money that if I threw these into a bucket of common rabbit feet..... nobody could tell me which set were from a "Snowshoe hare". 

There ain't a lick of difference, and a pinch of hair off of these magical "snowshoe hare" feet soaks up water just like a pinch of dryer lint does.   

Therefore, I hereby deem the magical snowshoe hare foot claim a myth.....a giant crock of BS.   

The reason why they don't get soaked while scampering over SNOW and ICE when they're still on the leporidae.....is because it's -14° below zero.   Duh!  🙄

Jesus Christ, fly tyers will fall for anything.    

[tjm]

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.   

[jdmidwest]

10 hours ago, BilletHead said:

    They are good luck only if it is the left foot.

Front or back?

[jdmidwest]

If they advertise snowshoe, it had better come off one.  I have a pair from the early 90's, stiffer fur than cotton tail or meat rabbit.

[BilletHead]

39 minutes ago, jdmidwest said:

Front or back?

         Back I was told.   A grandpa thing.   So many moons ago my grandpa living in Minnesota shot many snowshoes and he saved me one.  He salted it. I remember how it felt. Waxy and oily. I as a kid messed with it, and it finally fell apart. I never trimmed it to see if the hair floated or not. 

43 minutes ago, jdmidwest said:

If they advertise snowshoe, it had better come off one.  I have a pair from the early 90's, stiffer fur than cotton tail or meat rabbit.

                For sure. I have a couple too. The hair is really course. Very different than cottontail or meat rabbit. I remember the dyed rabbit foot key chains from the five and dime. 

[tjm]

3 hours ago, BilletHead said:

The hair is really course. Very different than cottontail or meat rabbit.

So you feel like you could find one or two "snowshoe" feet mixed with 98 "rabbit" feet?

4 hours ago, jdmidwest said:

If they advertise snowshoe, it had better come off one. 

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.

[fshndoug]

I am hare to tell you that you must create your own luck.

[fishinwrench]

So by all of this, I'm left to suspect that if you order a SNOWSHOE hare foot......and actually GET ONE...... Then (and only then) are you LUCKY 👍 

 

Just to be 100% sure, I tested the hair/fur between the toes, just to verify that it wasn't any different than the hair on the bottom of the foot.   

 Same results.   

So for my purposes, the original Calf Tail appears to be the best option.     Better even than all the crinkly synthetic fibers that I've tried so far.  It gets wet, but after one false cast it's dry again, and holds its position on the hook.   Everything else gets damp and permanently droops over to one side.  

CDC is another joke, but we won't go into that .....🙄

[BilletHead]

2 hours ago, tjm said:

So you feel like you could find one or two "snowshoe" feet mixed with 98 "rabbit" feet?

             For sure back feet no problem. Have you ever seen a snowshoe hair? I have out West and in Minnesota where grandpa lived. You can too once you see the size difference. 

Snowshoe Hare | National Wildlife Federation (nwf.org)

     A good picture of the feet size,

    Find me a cottontail with a foot size like this.

[fishinwrench]

2 minutes ago, BilletHead said:

You can too once you see the size difference

I had a neighbor once that had rabbits as big as a beagle.   They weren't Snowshoe hares.     

They also had a pair of Charpay (sp?) dogs, the ones with the cool wrinkly faces.   Those rabbits would put a thumpin' on those dogs when they got out of line. 😂