Excluded is the entomology of Diptera, which is so complex that I gave up trying to fathom it long ago, at the loss of not a single fish. In fact, I d been fishing Diptera imitations, simply calling them midges, for a long, long time before I was even aware they'd gotten the going -over from anglers determined to dabble in science. Blissfully I fished them then and continue to do so now, knowing little more about their body segments or wing veins than I did the day I discovered that trout like to eat them. Unlike mayflies, caddis or stoneflies, Diptera have no secondary sets of wings. But, then, the Diptera that interest me most as an angler are so small that secondary wings are hard to spot anyway.
Many anglers don t like to fish midges.
Nonetheless, fishing experience at home and abroad has afforded me some insights into fishing midges, worthy of all but perhaps the ultimate purist and the incurable romantic. I ve never struck a trout stream where I didn t find these insects, usually in abundance. Nelson s Spring Creek of Montana, and the Test, Itchen and Avon of Great Britain. Similarly, clouds of Diptera shade feeding trout on the Beaverkill, the Delaware, rivers, and on the Risle of Normandy, the Elle of Brittany, both in France, and Laxa I Laxadalur, the magnificent river of Northern Iceland where they represent the staple of the brown trout diet. Thus, it is fair to suppose that when encountering an unfamiliar trout fishery the angler shouldn t go entirely wrong when he s carrying Diptera imitations and knows how to fish them.