After fifty years of reading books on and about fly fishing for trout it is seldom that I read a book that causes me to call several of my most knowledgeable fly fishing aficionados and start talking about new found knowledge or asking the "Did you know..." question and then telling them that there is this book they must read.

Such was the case with Understanding Trout Behavior by John Goddard & Brian Clarke. This book was actually published originally as The Trout and the Fly -- A New Approach in 1980 in England and the United States but few copies were made available in this country. Thus when Lefty Kreh got permission to include this in his Lefy's Little Library of Fly Fishing (the first book in this series that wasn't penned by Lefty), it was doing a great service the American reader.

It is filled with great research and insight into how and what fish see, whether and how they see color, and how to use the knowledge learned in your everyday fishing.

From the Back Cover:
Catching a trout is among the most rewarding challenges in the entire sport of fly fishing because they are superbly adapted to their environment. To catch the wiliest among them, an angler must know all of the many defenses that trout employ to protect themselves from predators. In Understanding Trout Behavior, John Goddard and Brian Clarke give anglers invaluable advice about: how trout see a "window" of images that is refracted through water; how rises and other feeding behavior can tell you what fly to use; why casting vertically can reduce your chances of catching fish; why fish see more when they are in deeper water than when they are in shallow water; how to tie flies that take advantage of how trout see their world. (5 x 7 1/2, 160 pages, color photos, color illustrations, diagrams, charts)