There are several deer (and elk) hair suppliers. These days the largest suppliers are Wapsi and Hareline. The last 10-12 years the best hair seems to comes from a company named Nature’s Spirit. However recently this fly tier, Josh Varner, from Montana has took up preparing hair that goes beyond the amount for his own personal use.
His deer hair is all tanned, a proces of cleaning and preparing the hide that results in the hide staying soft. With raw hides you will need to spend some time scraping them to make sure you get any small chunks of meat off the hide. Salting and borax on the hide will also make the hide very stiff and brittle. Tanning is a much more complicated process. Josh only has deer hair at the moment. Maybe later on he will also offer elk hair as well. Josh only supplies to two fly shops so far.
I wanted to try his hair so I ordered to tie a few humpies. I ordered a patch of what he calls short fine deer hair. The shade I ordered is called ‘Ginger bleach’. The hair is silky smooth and soft. Yet I was surprised how sturdy the hair is as I put quite a lot of pressure when tying hair on the hook. The hair has very nice even tips. Not as short & pointy as elk hair, but that’s how deer hair is.
While patches used to be a 3x4 inch, these days the patches are even smaller. This patch was a mere 2x3 inch. This size seems to be the standard these days. The pricing of his hair is much higher than other brands. Basically double the price of Nature’s Spirit. So one has to consider whether paying this much is worth it. I've got more than enough hair so I'll order only when I see a color I'd like to add.
