Fly Tying

Fly Tying Rooster Capes are probably the most used tying material after hooks and threads. You will find different sources for feathers, for example and you can take the rooster scalp for your tying purposes when your grandma or your favorite aunt wants to prepare for you a delicious ” Coq au Vin ” . Or you can buy a cheap Indian cape from your local fishing store or an expensive genetic Whiting cape from the same store if they stock them. The cheapest starts from 3-4 Eur and a genetic one can arrive at 35-60eur.
I fully agree that a genetic cape is fantastic and gives you a great feeling tying with those feathers. But these genetic capes cannot cover the entire spectrum of colors and happens that a traditional rooster has nicer and more beautiful natural colors in fantastic shades. For this reason we have to look at cheap capes provided by rooster raised for food.
Another reason is when I combined CDC with classic hackle. In this situation I’m looking for more sparse feathers. For this reason I use good quality Indian Capes or I use local rooster capes from Transylvania. I prefer to use the local source because I know when the birds was sacrificed. I prefer fly tying rooster capes to be collected in the Winter time because the feathers are more shinny and the stems are more elastic.

In the photo bellow you can see from left to right a local cape from heart of Transylvania, Top Grade Indian cape in the middle and an A Indian Cape in the right. You can see that a Transylvanian capes is two time bigger and dense compared with an Indian Rooster Cape.

A grizzly cape looks like this one bellow:

And you can see how beautiful colors have these capes:

Grizzly:

Coachman brown:

Ginger:

Badger:

Chinchilla:

Chinchilla color is one of my favorite color, is very similar with cree color and suit perfectly for our duns and spinner flies from East and Central area of Europe.

A premium Indian Cape from Rooster is almost at half of the size with Transylvanian cape and the feathers are not so long and the stem is a little bit more thicker but is a great deal too. Also Indian Rooster Cape grade A has nice colored feathers but difficult to find hackle for size #14. Anyway soft hackle are on the sides of the capes and for tailing , these capes are fantastic!

if you want to buy them check our store here, you will find a nice selection of Transylvanian Rooster Capes and Indian Rooster Capes too.