Terrestrial · Family Formicidae
Flying Ant
Also called Ant fall, Carpenter ant.
Short answer
Ants fall onto rivers all summer and swarm in mating flights on warm, humid late-summer afternoons. Trout eat them out of all proportion to their size, and an ant fall can produce selective rising fish on a river with no hatch at all. Hook sizes 14 to 20.
What a flying ant is
Ants are in trout stomachs far more often than anglers expect, and there are two quite different ways they arrive. The first is a steady trickle all summer — ants fall off overhanging branches and get blown off banks, and a single sunk ant drifted along a grassy edge will take fish on the quietest afternoon of the year. The second is the mating flight: on warm, humid days in late summer, winged ants swarm and come down on the water in numbers, and trout that have ignored everything will start rising steadily to something you cannot see unless you look very closely.
- Hook size
- Hook sizes 14 to 20
- Colour
- Black, cinnamon-brown and occasionally rust red
The stages trout eat
- Terrestrial adult
- The wingless ant that falls in from the bank. Fished sunk or in the film, rarely high and dry.
- Flying ant
- The winged mating form. Falls in swarms and produces genuinely selective fishing.
- Drowned ant
- Ants sink quickly. A sunk ant fished like a tiny nymph is deadly and almost nobody does it.
When does the flying ant hatch?
| When | What is happening |
|---|---|
| May – June | A background food item. Worth fishing along wooded banks when nothing is hatching. |
| July – August | The best weeks, especially in the hour after a warm, humid morning. |
| Late August – September | Flying ant falls. Unpredictable, short, and the best of it is remarkable. |
| Rest of the year | Not a factor. Ants are a warm-weather insect. |
Emergence dates move with latitude, altitude and the weather of a given year. Treat these windows as a shape, not a diary, and check a local report before you travel.
Where it matters
Every wooded trout stream in the country. Small streams with overhanging cover — the Appalachians, New England, the Driftless, the Shenandoah brook trout streams — are the best of it, but ant falls happen on big western rivers too.
Fly fishing in Virginia Fly fishing in Pennsylvania Fly fishing in North Carolina Fly fishing in Vermont Fly fishing in New Hampshire
How to fish it
Fish it sunk, or at least in the film. Ants do not float high and trout know it, so a high-riding ant pattern is the commonest reason anglers decide ants do not work. On small streams, drift a size 16 black ant along the undercut bank and expect to be surprised. If fish are rising steadily to nothing visible on a humid August afternoon, put on a flying ant before you change anything else.
- Fish it in or under the film. A dry ant sitting high is the usual mistake.
- Humid, warm, late-summer afternoons are when flying ants fall.
- If nothing is hatching and fish are rising, try an ant before anything else.
Flies that imitate it
Each of these is a card in the deck, and each has a full page in Our Fly-brary.
Keep reading
- Dry fly vs nymph — which stage to fish, and when
- Why trout refuse your fly — usually the wrong stage, not the wrong pattern
- Best time of day to fly fish — the daily logic behind the table above
- Our Fly-brary — every fly in the deck, explained