fly-tying
the hobby or business of imitating the live food of gamefish by attaching various materials to a hook. Most often used to imitate various life stages of insects, the craft also imitates minnows and other natural foods. It has been estimated that more than a quarter of a million persons pursue fly-tying as a hobby. The origins of fly-tying date to the 1st or 2nd century BC in Macedonia, where brown-trout anglers attached feathers to their hooks to imitate the insect life in the streams. In England the art of fly-tying was systematized and recorded by Charles Cotton in Part 2 of later editions of Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler in the second half of the 17th century. Thus began centuries of experimentation, dispute, and often bickering among competing schools of fly-tying. The literature of angling and fly-tying is immense with more than 5,000 volumes in English alone.
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