"Rodgered By a Natural"

In the U.K.’s Times Online, Brian Clarke talks about all the “subsidiary passions” attached to fly fishing: literature, observance of nature, and, of course, the tying of insect imitations, some much better than others. “The world of close imitation has produced some wonderful boasts of accuracy

, my favourite being one recorded by a 19th-century angler in the records of the ancient Houghton Club in Hampshire. He claimed to have created such a realistic imitation of a female mayfly that ‘the moment I opened my box it was rodgered by a natural.'”