Chain Pickerel

The build is unmistakably pike: a long body, a duck-bill snout, and jaws that Maine's fisheries agency describes as elongated and containing large, sharp teeth. The name comes from the flank pattern — dark, interconnecting lines resembling the links of a chain over a lighter green-bronze ground. Telling a pickerel from a small northern pike is a cheek-and-chin exercise, and Maine's agency gives the keys: a pickerel's cheeks and gill covers are fully scaled, where a pike loses scales on the lower half of the gill cover, and a pickerel usually carries four pairs of sensory pores under the lower jaw to the pike's five. A dark vertical bar below the eye also separates it from a young muskellunge.

Chain pickerel are solitary ambush predators. North Carolina's agency describes them hiding in aquatic vegetation, waiting to ambush unsuspecting prey — a hunting style that keeps them in calm, weedy shallows, backwaters and lake margins. West Virginia adds small stream pools, abandoned channels and floodplain wetlands. The diet turns to fish early: by about four inches long, a young pickerel switches to eating mostly other fish. Spawning comes very early in spring, over vegetation, before most species have stirred. Where pike and pickerel share water, hybrids occur and can wear markings of either parent — worth remembering before calling a borderline fish.

Pickerel fishing is casting at cover with something that flashes. The fish commits from ambush or not at all, so covering weed edges efficiently beats working any one spot slowly.