Thanks for indulging my flights of fancy: as I told William once, the next time I hit a Pantera
martinius hatch, I'll be ready.
At any rate, to answer William's quesiton, there are four wraps of brown hen through the thorax (which y'all would be able to see if I hadn't forgotten to adjust my white balance

). Because I was capturing it with thread rather than wire as Mr. Collier does, I wrapped the thread up toward the eye, left a loop of thread there (
a la letumgo's Rock Worm pattern), then took the thread back toward the hookpoint. At that point, I spun a healthy amount of dubbing in the loop and wrapped it back, "bow to stern" as it were, tied it off and it picked it out, then finished the fly, Hidy style. (The grouse I tied in by the tip because, as Mr. Tufnel would remind us, sometimes you need to go to "11.")
Otherwise, I'll be curious as to how it fishes, and whether "flash vs. translucence" is an either-or. (Though it occurs to me that you could wrap a silk rib that's been touched-dubbed with a little mole over the tinsel, bloa-style, and get the best of both worlds...if the tinsel wasn't too slick to maintain the spiral thread wraps.)