Frequently during the summer and early fall, I see trout rising very delicately to feed on the surface when there is no hatch of Aquatic insects. Once on a small Pennsylvania stream, I encountered this and none of the flies I showed them would bring strikes. There was a large brown trout delicately rising to some naturals 40 feet downstream from me, right below an old fallen down barbed wire fence. I really wanted to get into that brown. However, I had no idea what he was taking. In an effort to discard this, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled until I was 20 feet from him; the next 10 feet, I slithered on my stomach. I watched my brown trout closely and finally, I spotted what he was feeding upon. He was taking small flat-floating leaf hoppers that Charlie Fox had told me about several weeks earlier.
As I looked through my fly box, I saw that my Murray’s Dry Stoneflies size 18 in both black and bronze looked much like those leaf hoppers and if I trimmed the stomach of my flies, they would float flat on the stream surface just like the real Leaf Hoppers. Placing a Bronze size 18 Stonefly on a 7x leader, I drifted it downstream to the trout on a slack line cast. He rose and took it solidly. For the rest of that day, I took many more trout on these flies.
Since that day, I’ve come that many of the rising trout that I suspected were feeding on midges and ants, were actually feeding on these Terrestrial Leaf Hoppers and my Little Flat- Floating Stoneflies would take them.