All hail the mighty rainbow trout!

The past several posts here featured swans, chickens, lizards and tigers.  This post is an attempt to launch out of the animal world and back into the human, but let’s go out in style, shall we?

As Dave Barry used to say, I am not making this up.

After a couple of hours out of the house this weekend, I returned to the breathless excitement of my young daughter exclaiming, “Momma!  Come see!  Daddy found a butt munch.”

Ahem?  I mean, I’m sure he did.  What?

She dragged me into the kitchen where her father rolled his eyes in mock horror.  “You’d think fishing is safe….we were just looking at fishing flies.”

My girl proudly opened the latest L.L. Bean fishing catalogue.  “See, momma, there’s the butt munch.”  And lo and behold, there it was.  The Butt Munch Beetle, to be exact.  It comes in metallic blue, metallic copper, or metallic green.  $2.25 each.

Here are some other words and phrases we acquired recently, thanks to L. L.:

• Psycho Prince
• Squirrel Nymph
• Quasimodo
• New Trick Soft Hackle
• Mouserat
• Hornberg
• Surf Candy
• Crazy Charlie
• Rag Head Crab

And while these, my friends, hold a fair amount of barely suppressed laughter from the parents in the house, by far and away the child’s all-time favorites are……..wait for it…………

The Bean Wooly Bugger

The Egg Sucking Crystal Leech and the Hot Bead Bugger.  Wooly Bugger comes in a distant third, and let me tell you, it’s no surprise a Hot Bead Bugger will cost you a pretty penny.  It’s $2.25 where the Wooly Bugger is but $1.85.

Not particularly noted by the child, but worthy of honorable mention to those of you who appreciate such strange pockets of humor, I leave you with my nominees for underdog flies of 2011:  The Shenandoah Chugger; The Humpy; The Conehead Madonna; The Zonker; and The Mushmouth.   Sometimes truth is just funnier than anything you can imagine….and I am not making that up.

Image credits (in order of appearance): Mountain Anglers, J. Gaucher, L.L. Bean