Jacky's Beetle

Looking through PM today for something else, I got sidetracked (as you do) with the conversation between the Ds and Jacky on the bridge in Chapter XIII.  Jacky is showing the Ds where all the trout are, and he drops insects into the water for the fish to take:

"Bracken clock's best of all . . ."

"What's a bracken clock?"

"June beetle" said Jacky.

I must admit that Jacky's explanation didn't help me much. However an insect recognition book informs me that the "bracken clock" is a North Country name for the Garden Chafer (phyllopertha horticola) - "a common beetle, seen in large swarms on a sunny day". However, the next sentence in the insect book gave me a thrill: "It is well known to anglers, who sometimes call it by the colloquial name of Coch-y-bonddhu, since it is a favourite food of the Brown Trout."

I checked with a fishing fly website, and they still sell a 'wet fly' called 'coch-y-bonddhu', which imitates a garden chafer. It all hangs together - this must have been AR's favourite fly. I wonder if the celtic name appealed to him? Just as well - the boat which TARS has lovingly preserved might not be so loveable if she were called 'Garden Chafer'.

Previously Peter Hyland wrote:

 I wonder if the celtic name appealed to him? Just as well - the boat which TARS has lovingly preserved might not be so loveable if she were called 'Garden Chafer'. 

Maybe we just have to be thankful that AR seems to have preferred Welsh to Latin. Having a boat called Garden Chafer might have lacked a certain romance, but it could have been a lot worse - what if she'd been called Phylloperta Horticola...? 

More seriously, it's a fascinating little link to find that conversation in Picts and Martyrs, alongside Cochy in her fictional guise as Scarab. I wonder if AR included it as an intentional reference?

May I ask whether your reference book included a picture of Phylloperta Horticola and, if so, what it looks like? Especially colours?

The garden chafer, or coch-y-bonddhu, is not desperately exciting as regards its colours. I reckon that posting up an image on the TARS Forum is covered in Lesson 34, and I have only just reached Lesson 3. So I'll have a go at giving a URL to an exterior site, in the fond hope that "URLs will be automatically hyperlinked". Oh yeah? Well here goes anyway:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3234/3005582703_eab41ee237.jpg

In case it doesn't work, this beetle is about 8mm long, has brown wings and a dark green thorax (and I think I see one crawling round my collar . . . . .)

Hmmm. that looks delicious

It is to brown trout! However, I am a bit puzzled as to how the fish get at them. The garden chafer is a leaf-eater, so I presume that these beetles manage to fall onto the water surface, and then get eaten. Incidentally, I think the wing colour must be more reddish than appears on the illustration, as 'Coch' means red.

I think the fishing fly certainly is not much like the bug

but then I am not a trout so they must see this very differently.

Not much of a fly fisherman either, however I find  trout are pretty tasty too.

As to the real insect, if they swarm in large numbers maybe some fall into the water, usually they swarm to mate and maybe as with other insects they then die and then fall into the water.

Previously Robin Marshall wrote:

I think the fishing fly certainly is not much like the bug

Looking at Robin's picture of the Coch-y-bonddhu fly, I can see why fisherman give it that name, because it is clearly red and black. This isn't nearly so obvious in the beetle itself, as shown by Peter's picture, although I note he did mention that the beetle's wings may have more red than the image suggests.

I suppose there is the question of what a trout actually sees? I'm not sure there is any way to know this for sure. Maybe biologists can examine trout eyes and work out just what combination of light, colours and shapes they physically record. But this wouldn't tell us how a trout thinks, ie how it turns what it "sees" into thought and then into action. Is it instinct? Or logical thought? Or a mix of both?

Somewhere AR wrote a letter, or an article about the mystery of why fishermen can catch salmon with flies when the salmon are going up river to breed. Apparently it was well-known that salmon don't feed whilst doing this, so logically shouldn't be interested when they see a fishing fly of a particular type. (At least, I think these were the details; I'm going off memory, as I can't track down where I read this just now. Does anyone else recall this?).

In his article (or letter) Ransome suggested that he'd found a possible answer when he saw some Americans chewing gum - ie that it may be the salmon simply like the taste of particular flies, or else just enjoy the sensation of catching and chewing them, even when they don't need to eat.

Now I'm not sure where that leaves us, except perhaps that the fish is able to associate an immediate sensation (the sight of a certain combination of shape and colour, behaving in a certain way) with its past memories and then combine these with ideas on how to react (perhaps by grabbing the object, having decided it might taste nice; perhaps by ignoring it for whatever reason).