I use a Blackberry at my job and when I have it with me it means I also have a camera with me. But I don’t have a personal supercomputercamerasmartphonedevice and I’m not really Jonesing to get one. If I had one and I carried it with me, the magical sight I just experienced would never have occurred, of that I’m certain. Even if I had a camera and I attempted to photograph it, I don’t think I could capture the breadth of the experience.
I was out with the dogs by the lake, at the south end of the water filtration plant, shivering because of the cold wind down by the lake. Looking over toward Port Credit, streamers blew across the sky. It darkened above me quite suddenly and the sleet that came down cut into my face. There was a chop on the lake and there must have been an emergence of thousands of those midges that have been swarming around the shore in clouds the last couple weeks. I couldn’t actually see any of the bugs. Instead, I watched hundreds of swallows swooping about just above the surface of the water, gorging themselves on the tiny insects. Looking from the yacht club harbour west along the lake, the birds were feeding as far as I could see.
What a spectacular sight!
27th Street 
A big hatch of aquatic bugs leaving their watery home and flying off in the air always amazes me but even more so when the local bird population realizes that lunch is served. I will never forget one afternoon on a not too distant trout stream when there was a light hatch of a fat chunky mayfly known as the light Cahill. Maybe a couple of these were hatching every second within sight and the purple martins had found them. Martins are a very fast very agile bird and they were racing along the middle of the stream at about 3/4 speed and 10 feet high. When they saw a mayfly they would turn on the afterburners and home in on the moving bug at full speed. I sat on a rock and watched the show for 15 minutes. They would hit the mayfly with such speed that I could hear a little thwack from 20 meters away. And I didnt see a single missed attack. Amazing birds. Under the water’s surface the trout were snarfing down that mayflies as well as the unsuspecting insects tried to make their way to the surface and I was there trying to trick some unsuspecting trout into trying to eat a fake mayfly. There is probably a moral of some sort in there along the lines of… there isnt much future in being an insect. Or a trout . Or maybe a human either for that matter
In my experience the best way to fish a light cahill hatch is with a soft-hackle or other wet fly or to use an emerger pattern like a Usual and drown the fly. I’m not enough of a bug guy to tell you exactly why that is but that is what I’ve found anectdotally, especially on tailwaters and other streams where the trout get selective.
I believe the deal with the cahills is they dont flop around on the surface trying to dry their wings where they become sitting ducks. I think they somehow pop up to the surface and take off right away. I also suspect that pretty much everybody uses an incorrect dry imitation. I think the classic pattern with the pale lemon wings works better than a near white pattern even though the mayfly is clearly pretty much white when it flies off. My suspicion is that the wings are not so white when they first emerge and are wet. That said the cahill hatch can be a pretty tough one to succeed in. I like it though because you can see the bugs and the trout tend to be fairly visible during the hatch.
That sounds amazing! Definitely not something that could easily be caught on “film”…