Location: Silver Creek, Idaho.  The above series of images was taken today.  The time was around 1:30 PM.  Glassy water and not a trace of wind and callibaetis doing a mild callibaetis dance and hoppers pushing out through the tall dry grasses and trout feeding on various mayflies and even a floating artificial Morris #8 hopper pattern attached to nothing but the undulatory current floated by.  A fisherman upstream must have lost this sacred hopper pattern and I was lucky enough to have spotted it run through a pod of fish and watched one fish hammer it and spit it out and then another rainbow sipped it like fine food and spit it out too as though the foam and thread and hook were an insult to their fine spring creek palettes.  Watching spring creek trout feed and especially at Silver Creek in the Fall is a fundamental learning experience.  After some time observing mainly rainbows taking various bugs, all kinds of thoughts come to mind.  What are the trout actually thinking just prior to a "take"?  What makes one fish interested in bug A when another fish won't even consider bug A?  So I grabbed a small wad of spiderweb laced with dozens of tricos and dropped it on the feeding lane.  The result?  A resounding YES!  The series of images above I took of the floating trico-laced-spiderweb running the perfect drift to a zealous rainbow.  Call this rainbow, "Spidy."  I ran another gob of web and tricos to a different rainbow--the bottom image below-- and the same result.  I have done this same thing a few times over the course of the last two seasons but never photographed this luxury dining.  To talk about this phenomenon could only result in rolling of the eyes or "Oh, Sures" or even, better yet, quiet acknowledgement of more unecessary fishperbole.  Some time passed and I had a group of men locked out of their car watching me grab these gobs of spiderwebs and dropping them upstream of different fish.  The guys were from out of state and I could here one them say,"Silver Creek fish are too smart for that."  I didn't say anything to them or mention the fact that minutes prior it actually worked.  No other fish were interested in the "web".  Just Spidy and one other rainbow took the wad.  So why those two rainbows and no others...?

 

Rainbow taking a spiderweb laced with tricos.  Silver Creek, Idaho

Camera: Nikon D3S

Lens: Nikon 80-200 f2.8 AFS