Other · Salmonid ova
Egg
Also called Roe, Glo-bug, Beads.
Short answer
Trout eat the eggs of spawning fish, and an egg pattern is the most effective fly in the country during and after a salmon, steelhead or trout spawning run. It is not a hatch, it is a food supply, and it works from autumn through spring depending on which fish is spawning.
What a egg is
Spawning fish produce vast numbers of eggs and a great many of them wash loose, and every trout downstream knows it. In Alaska, rainbows spend the autumn holding behind sockeye and eating what drifts back. In the Great Lakes tributaries, resident trout and steelhead follow salmon runs for the same reason. On western tailwaters, brown trout spawn in autumn and rainbows in spring, and both produce weeks of egg fishing. An egg pattern is often dismissed as unsporting, which is a judgment about taste rather than about whether trout eat them — they do, enormously.
- Hook size
- Hook sizes 8 to 16, or a bead of 6 to 10 millimetres
- Colour
- Orange, peach, chartreuse, pale pink and cream. Faded cream imitates a dead egg and often outfishes bright ones.
The stages trout eat
- Fresh egg
- Bright orange and translucent. Matched by a fresh-coloured bead or yarn egg.
- Dead egg
- Pale, opaque and cream-white. Frequently the better fly after a run has been going a while.
- Flesh
- After a Pacific salmon run, decaying flesh drifts too, and a flesh fly takes over from the egg.
When does the egg hatch?
| When | What is happening |
|---|---|
| August – October | Alaska. Sockeye and other Pacific salmon spawn, and rainbows feed behind them. |
| September – December | Great Lakes tributaries and western tailwaters. Salmon and brown trout spawning. |
| March – May | Rainbow and steelhead spawning. The spring egg season on tailwaters and the Great Lakes. |
| Rest of the year | Not a factor, and an egg fished out of season is just an attractor. |
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
Alaska above all, then the Great Lakes tributaries of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, New York and Minnesota, and the tailwaters of Arkansas, Missouri and Kentucky during the autumn brown trout spawn.
Fly fishing in Alaska Fly fishing in Michigan Fly fishing in Ohio Fly fishing in Arkansas Fly fishing in New York
How to fish it
Dead drift it on the bottom, downstream of spawning fish rather than among them. The ethical point matters here and is simple: do not fish to fish that are actively on a redd, and do not wade through gravel where eggs are. Fish the run below instead, which is where the eating fish are anyway, and where the biggest trout of the year are very often sitting.
- Fish below the redds, never on them. The feeding fish are downstream anyway.
- A pale, dead-looking egg often beats a bright one after the first week of a run.
- After a Pacific salmon run finishes, switch from eggs to flesh.
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