Quick-strike pike is the stealthiest of eaters

Some years ago I had a chance meeting with George Orwell in WH Smith at Paddington station. I needed a book and Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, his 1939 novel in which a suburban insurance salesman, George Bowling, tries to recapture his youth in Lower Binfield beside the tranquil fishponds of his childhood, was on offer.
During the subsequent three hours on the InterCity train, Bowling (a very thinly fictionalised Orwell) relayed to me everything that is wrong in an adulthood alienated from nature, such as failing to see the natural wonders in still water. As Bowling/Orwell expressed it: “Why don’t people, instead of the idiocies they do spend their time on, just walk round looking at things? That pool, for instance — all the stuff that’s in it … mystery of their lives, down there under water.”
I took the novel to heart and became an inveterate pond-maker, whether the pond was an old kitchen sink in the back yard or a full-scale farm job done with a digger. I try never to pass a pond or lake without an appreciative gawp. Really, the things that live down there, under water!
One of the best places I know for fish-spotting is Crummock Water in the Lake District, where the water possesses extraordinary clarity, having a water column transparency (Secchi depth) of more than 13 feet. The other day I paddled over the stone shingle, looked down and there, basking, was a pike a good 60cm in length. Shovel snout, elongated body, leopard spots of gold on emerald; like a fingerprint, the skin pattern is unique to the individual.
The pike, probably a female — the distaff of the species is larger and may achieve 50lb in weight — eyeballed me before contemptuously moving off with lazy flexes of its body. A pike on the hunt, in contrast, coils its body into a compressed “S”, then straightens out with a whip of its tail to achieve an instantaneous acceleration of 245m/s2 . Quick as a flash. Once the prey is caught, the pike forms its body into a “C” configuration, which slows the fish down almost as quickly as it launched, using the resistance of the water. The mouth contains 700 teeth, backward-sloping to prevent prey escaping; other fish figure high on the menu (perch is a particular favourite), along with moorhens, coots, ducks, voles, rats and frogs. Cannibalism is common. Esox lucius is an apex predator; “pike”, by the way, is from the weapon used in medieval combat, a pole with a metal blade on top.
Pike rarely attack humans. Nevertheless, I headed for dry land. Young pike, or jacks, remain close to their inshore birthing area for their first year and will dawdle in the late summer shallows, even in water only ten centimetres deep.
In the coastal waters around Cornwall, the pilchards are still shoaling. Their fishy presence is often indicated by the tell-tale signs of a travelling purply-oily patch darkening the sea near the surface, or gannets diving into the water. The birds fall from on high, folding their six-foot wings to achieve velocity, the impact of their bodies causing an eruption of Krakatoan spray; the northern gannet, Morus bassanus, is a big bird, goose-sized almost. For several seconds each bird disappears. Most plunges are relatively shallow but gannets can dive as deep as 20 metres. For 500 years Sardina pilchardus was the staple catch of the Cornish fleet, trapped in seine nets for home consumption but also to export abroad, especially to Italy as Lenten food, leading to a jovial toast there that ended: “There’s nothing like pilchards for saving the soul.” Ubiquitous and cheap, the pilchard (invariably canned and doused in tomato) fell out of table fashion in the UK and the Cornish pilchard fleet almost died in the water in the 1960s. Some judicious rebranding as “Cornish sardine” has revived the industry.
A poke around a rock pool rarely fails to reveal fauna and flora (and intermediate lifeforms) of interest, such as the rosé-hued coral weed. Like true corals, this miniature, bushy seaweed turns to stone by extracting calcium from the seawater; as it grows it adds parts, like tiny beads threaded on a string. To the touch Corallina officinalis is disconcertingly brittle and crunchy, which is its defence: it is all but inedible to bottom grazers such as starfish and snails. However, its rigid, upright feathery fronds — ethereally beautiful — provide a home for a host of tiny organisms, including larval fish. Truly, the things you find down there, under the waters.