"Big Dale" wrote in message
...

I have used coyote and fox tail for tying clousers, don't know why racoon
tail
wouldn't work for either clousers or blondes.

He is now dead so I can say the big secret
of Raymond Arsenault's RAT series of salmon
flies (at Campbelltown, NB) was his use of
coyote for the wing rather than the gray fox or
gray squirrel suggested in most pattern books.
(The basis of this conclusion is that, after a very
pleasant hour-long chat in 1978, when I guessed the
RAT wing might be coyote he immediately threw me
out of his store.)

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)