My Never Ending Quest for Indian Crow?the Real Thing and its Substitutes
---A thirty-five year history of exploration.


Of all the feathers we use for our Salmon flies, those from the Cotingas are the most difficult to come by. This family of birds come from the Amazon regions of South America. The ones we are most familiar with are the five Indian Crows genus Pyroderus scatatus, the seven genus Cotinga ( pretty bright bluish feathered birds), and the two genus Rupicola or Cocks-of-the-rock. The breathtaking Macaws also live in the forests, but are readily available and thrive in the US. Not so for the Cotingas. I have yet to hear of a Fruit Crow in any American Zoo. Thank Heaven for those Zoos, or else we would be in the same boat for such other essentials as Kori and a dozen or so other exotics from which we can harvest molted feathers.

When I first became infected with ASD (Atlantic Salmon Disease), whenever a pattern called for Indian Crow, I just tied in a neck feather from a red Cardinal head a tying friend had given me. I know because I have the first full dressed fly I ever did, a Green Highlander, hanging framed in my bathroom. It is dated 1969. I had always figured real IC was too hard to find and too expensive to use.

When I was first active in The Group during the late eighties, I became more curious, and researched Cotingas by obtaining a book from the University of Illinois library by Dr. David Snow, who devoted much of his adult life to studying the birds of the Amazon. His neat book is full of information.

(Frankly, I can?t imagine anyone devoting a large portion of their adult life to studying birds. The only thing more silly would be someone becoming obsessed with obtaining the tiny little feathers from those birds?.)

I copied about forty pages from the book and distributed them among a select few of the members who were interested. Not surprisingly, John McLain got hold of a fifth generation copy from Gene Sunday, who got a copy from Jack Madden, who?..you get the idea. The material is as relevant, and sadly, up to date, today as it was back then. Not a lot of bird research is being done lately in the Amazon rain forest because it is also the unhealthy environment of the Drug Lords. How is this for a title--?Cocaine is grown where the big Red Fruit Crow Lives?--- Soon to be a major motion picture, starring Harrison Ford as the Great IC Hunter.

Which helps explain why it continues to be difficult to obtain fresh skins today. Remember, we are not talking about using large molted feathers here. We need skin patches from Cotingas because there is no practical way to find, much less harvest those tiny dropped feathers on the Rainforest floor. The never-ending destruction of the Amazon Rainforest for lumber strongly contributes to a diminishing habitat and corresponding smaller number of birds. Additionally, the various SA countries all have rigidly enforced, strong laws and penalties for attempting to kill and export the bird skins. The problem is not the CITES laws, but the countries where the birds reside.

McLain has recently pointed out the irony here is that those countries all encourage the harvesting and export of cocaine because of the tremendous financial gain, but the Cotinga market is too small for the same ?legal considerations?.

Most probably the majority of the feathers we see today come from old skins collected by Ornithologists or from old stuffed mounts, mainly from the UK. Wherever they came from, there is clearly not a lot of Indian Crow around. What is for sale is expensive, ranging from $10-15 apiece for decent feathers, to somewhat less when bought in quantities of 50 or more. Still, a tidy bit of change.

Well, lately I decided to change all that and obtain quantities of Indian Crow patches. (The bright orangish-red throat and breast patch is all we want from this large Crow-like bird, since all the other plumage is, not surprisingly, all black.)

I mean, after all, I was now living in Miami, the jumping off point to SA, and with all my contacts, the most important of which were employees of mine who came from, frequently travel to, and still have close family in Columbia and Venezuela. Did I not also have a former college room-mate who has lived in Brazil his entire adult life? The very habitat of the Fruit Crow. This was going to be easy.

Not so.

Every attempt failed over a three month concerted campaign to get skins. No one in those countries would risk the penalties if caught. Coke, Yes ?.Crow, No.

End of quest for the real thing..

The next best thing to do was to get the best possible substitute for this illusive Crow.

Obviously, others have faced the same challenge over the years, and there were several interesting solutions out there. The easiest is to use a red feather from another bird. There are dozens of birds that exhibit a small bright red feather in the general shape and size to IC. Not multi-colored, but a colorful natural substitute. There are the Weavers, the Pitas and even the domestic Red Cardinal. Pluck it and tie it in.

If that is too hard to come by, simply dye the small end of a white capon hen neck bright orange/red and be done with it. The small feathers make a bold colorful dyed sub. Donnagal offered such a neck for $4.95 in their 1982 catalog

The similarity in size makes the white neck feather from the plentiful RNP (Ringed Neck Pheasant) an obvious choice for other dyed subs with some color variations like the real thing. The feathers are fairly uniform in size, but generally in the useful range for exhibition patterns.

We need to take a close look at the real thing before we go any further. McLain has a rare color shot of the skins of the five subspecies Pyroderus scatatus.



Even this shot shows there is a range of color variation among the five. They all have a varying degree of bright orange-red bands at the end of the feathers, with an even brighter deep red edge. While not visible in this photo, the base colors of the feathers range from dull tan to orangish-yellow, and every shade in between. The most obvious feature is the bright end band, and several species have a tiny crimp at the very tip. Just how far you want to go to duplicate the real feathers will dictate the next steps.

Eric Otzinger, a talented West Coast Salmon tyer and Group member, developed and sold a wonderful sub from dyed white RNP feathers with a base color reminiscent of Scatatus scatatus, and a bright red band at the tip. He used water-based bright dyes and some ingenious tools to make his two-color subs. The then-famous Bob Marriott Fly Shop sold them for about a buck apiece in their 1988 catalog.

Another Group member Marvin Nolte around that time developed a neat modified clothes-pin device to put a crimp in end of Eric?s sub, and this combo was used by several highly visible members for years with great success. Both Eric and Marvin are featured in Judith Dunham?s gorgeous hardcover Salmon Fly. Eric?s subs are shown in the materials section of the book, and fly photos of several of the other featured tyers used this sub. Click HERE for Marvin?s simple directions in a first year?s issue of Salmon Flyer. Even today there are those that put in that crimp using an eyelash curler. Whatever makes you feel pretty.

By coincidence, in the very same issue of Salmon Flyer is a very detailed article by John Pike, for a six step dying procedure using both hot water dye bath and a variety of marking pens to achieve an interesting, if not overly complicated, dyed IC sub. Click HERE. This article is an expanded version of an earlier article he did for the previous issue. There clearly was strong interest in this subject way back then.

Several years later in Salmon Flyer, Dr. Dye first emerged. Ted Roubal spells out his instructions for an IC dyed sub using a combination of naturally occurring dye stuffs and industrial dye chemicals. Click HERE. His highly scientific approach is later more fully detailed with a full chapter in Mike Radencich?s classic hardcover, Tying the Classic Salmon Fly.

Wayne Luallen uses Eric?s sub and Marvin?s crimper in this same book, as he goes through all the steps in completing a flawless Baron. That chapter alone is worth the price of this classic book, as it is loaded with clear words and brilliant pictures from one of the better teachers still around today.

All of these multicolored subs use the white RNP feather, which as popular as it is, still falls short in feather composition to the real IC. Like most feathers, the RNP feathers have barbules and barbicels which lock together and hold the feather in shape. The feather is rather opaque looking. The IC lacks this zip-lock system and the end of the feather is more airy and gossamer in appearance. The colors are therefore more subtle, and concentrated in the very tip of the rachis. Subsequently, all the dyed subs are relatively heavy handed in coloration as compared to the real IC.

As stated before, you decide how close you want your sub to be to the real IC, and how much you aim toward deception, as opposed to simply producing a pretty feather with the same general shape and color.

Sound psychotic? Probably, and not surprisingly, I?ve been there and done it. You can carefully bleach out the RNP prior to putting on the color bands and come up with more realistic sub. This delicate and most difficult procedure is probably not worth the time and energy, unless you have a lot of feathers to burn up. This is pretty hit and miss feather altering, and the consensus of people I talk to seem to pass on this procedure, and stay with simply coloring the white RNP feathers.

And there we have it. My journey is nearing an end. John and I spent hours discussing and experimenting on just what form an acceptable IC sub should take. The result is available for sale in the Materials For Sale section of this site.

We both are happy to share this background and the formulas and tools we use for the IC sub. John lays on the background color on the white RNP feathers with a moderate solution of Sienna from his current dye source of choice. Click HERE for full details and dying procedures from the manufacturer. Bags of these feathers are then sent to me for the finishing steps.

I begin by using a two step dying process to over dye a band of Hot Orange, followed by a smaller band of rich scarlet red. The bands are put on with the aid of 1-?? round rubber gaskets found at Home Depot, and described as Fender Washers. These are rubber cemented to identical sized stainless steel washers. Two such rubber coated washers are sandwiched and clamped together to form a liquid tight seal for hot solution dying. The previously dyed feathers are wetted, preened and laid along the outer edge of a rubber washer with the proper amount of tip exposed to accept the larger first band of Hot Orange dye. I find a fine point 90 degree tweezers makes placing each feather much easier. Click HERE for a picture of the items.

Each washer properly filled will hold about forty wet, and preened feathers. A second rubber washer is then laid on top of the first, rubber to rubber, trapping the preened feathers with just the tips exposed, click HERE to see. Two or more washer sandwiches can all be clamped together at one time for dying, allowing eighty or more feathers to be processed at one time. Remember to leave a small portion of the ring without feathers so you have no feathers to burn on the bottom part of the ring that rests on the bottom of the dye pan when the loaded clamp in dropped in. Click HERE to see.

I use a strong Pony stainless steel spring clamp Model #3202. It exerts enough pressure to make the seals really waterproof and prevents the dyes from soaking past the rubber washers. While never confirmed, we believe this is basically the same technique Eric Otzinger used to create his single red ring.

I use a moderate solution of Veniard Hot Orange, a scant 1/8 tsp. in to two cups of hot water and add two TBS of household vinegar when the water reaches 190 degrees F. A two minute soak brings up a rich Hot Orange band which looks a lot darker when wet. Remove the clamped washers, rinse first cold to set the color, open the clamps, peal off the wet feathers into a fine mesh strainer and rinse well in hot water until no more color runs off. Again preen each wet feather and place on a paper towel to dry. They should pop up dry in about fifteen minutes.

The second smaller band of red is handled identically, carefully placing the wet preened feathers along the outer edge to reveal about half the Hot Orange ring previously laid on. I use a variety of scarlet red dyes for the second ring and they all work well with a one to two minute soak. Wash, rinse, preen and dry as before.

The feathers are then finished by lightly touching the very edges of the scarlet tip with a Sanford Red Permanent Fine Point marker. Experiment on how you grip or pull the feather together to paint the edges to give you just the effect of darkening you desire. Brushing the marker too hard or too slowly against the edge causes excessive soaking. Use a light, quick brushing motion. John does it one way, while I prefer another. Both work well.

That?s it. Fairly labor intensive with at least four dying steps, but the result is a perfectly acceptable dyed ?Alternative? as John prefers to call it. The way things are going today, real Indian Crow will continue to become increasingly difficult to find, and correspondingly more expensive. So we may all be forced to accept Substitutes or Alternatives. Make ?em or buy them from John. It?s your choice.

Editors note. After all that trouble to come up with a viable substitute, Don found this: