Article on eggs

**Nymphmeister** · 12-02-2007, 09:43 PM

Thought you guys might find the following article I found online interesting:

Eggs, they're what's for dinner
By Charlie Meyers
Denver Post Outdoors Editor
02/18/2007

As the calendar moves closer to snowmelt, deciding what will produce the most and biggest trout is a no-brainer. Only question is, which color and size egg should you choose?

Make no mistake: If you want to catch a fish as quickly as possible, put an egg on your hook.

"Fish are programmed to eat that egg. They can't help themselves," said Charlie Craven, owner of Charlie's Fly Box shop in Arvada and one of the most skilled tyers in the land. You want reasons why?

"No other available food source has so many calories per weight," said Dr. Robert J. Behnke, a retired Colorado State University professor. Last month, Behnke sat in his Fort Collins living room bantering with Wendell Ozefovich, an out-of-state visitor on a break from his seminar schedule at The Fly Fishing Show.

Behnke knows more about salmonids than any person on the planet. Ozefovich has spent a good part of the past nine years studying trout habits through an underwater camera lens. The combined revelations of the two were enough to make an observer discard the contents of a couple fly boxes and fill it with egg patterns instead.

Ozefovich's carefully crafted DVDs clearly show the interplay among various trout species over these juicy orbs - from cruel jostling in an attempt to prematurely dislodge a ripe female to film of male and female spawners actively chowing down on their own eggs.

"The female generally tries to fight the male away, but she often takes some of the loose eggs herself," he said. "Everything not covered up gets eaten."

It certainly comes as no surprise that the major spawning periods - spring and early summer for rainbow and cutthroat, fall for brook trout and brown trout - provide the best opportunity for this strategy. What many anglers don't realize is that some kind of fish egg is prominent in the drift almost any time of the year.

Some of the sources will amaze you, and help explain some of the enduring mysteries about things such as size and color.

One of the puzzles is the role of suckers in the equation. In case you haven't perceived a positive role for ol' bugle mouth in the natural order of things, consider that suckers spray their eggs without benefit of proper burial into the fast water flowing from the tail of a pool.

When this occurs in late April and May in lower reaches and into June toward the headwaters, guess what will be standing in line to eat them?

Then there's the almost equally under-appreciated whitefish. In the rivers of northwest Colorado where these exist in large numbers, spawning in early autumn attracts rainbows and browns eager for a nutritional boost.

Next comes the ever-changing riddle of the rainbow trout. Considering all the various strains scattered about by public and private hatcheries - including counter-season specimens from the southern hemisphere - rainbows spawn somewhere in Colorado nearly every month.

As Behnke further suggests, there's even a dinner-bell aspect to all this, a chemical signal exuded by ripe females, much like a deer or elk in estrus. Companies such as Berkley have captured these scents in the various compounds they use to make highly effective baits.

The questions of color can be explained in part by this wide dispersal of fish species. Suckers deposit eggs colored tannish orange; whitefish pale gold. Rainbow spawn is tiny and orange, while brookie eggs have a translucence that Ozefovich imitates by dyeing white yarn in strong tea. But, with apologies to Dr. Seuss, what in the world is going on with this green egg thing?

Denver's Mike Briscoe, a noted fish catcher, believes trout gobble green eggs for the same reasons all fish species are attracted to chartreuse lures.

"Visibility has to be a major part of it."

Craven agrees about color, even while confessing to a certain bias he shares with other skilled fly anglers.

"There's a certain time in life when it's about challenge, not just catching fish."

So what if it's a rough day and the trout just aren't biting? "Eggs are always something to fall back on."

**Nymphmeister** · 12-03-2007, 10:37 PM

So I guess if you live in CO, you can fish egg flies 12 months a year and be "matching the hatch". That's so beautiful, Lol.

**Troutfishing4life** · 12-13-2007, 11:56 PM

very interesting article I have still not gotten a trout on a egg fly but beads are different

Mike

**Nymphmeister** · 01-14-2008, 03:11 AM

Both egg flies & beads have their moments. I got to see just how deadly beads were on a Great Lakes trip a couple seasons ago. And over the years, I've probably caught an easy 20% of my resident stream trout on various egg patterns. When they work, they work well indeed. Real eggs have lots of calories in them and cannot swim away- it's an easy, fattening meal for the trout. They don't have to chase them down like a minnow.