Pickerel in a ditch.

May 11. 

May 11, 2018

P. M. – Wishing to get one of the little brook (?) pickerel, of Hubbard's ditches, in the arethusa meadow, I took a line in my pocket, and, baiting with a worm and cutting a pole there, I caught two directly. 

The biggest was nine inches long and thickly barred transversely with broken dark greenish brown lines, alternating with golden ones. The back was the dark greenish brown with a pale-brown dorsal line. Both have the vertical dark or black line beneath the eyes and appearing, with the pupil and a mark above, to pass through it. Noticed the same in the reticulatus the other day. 

The head, i. e. to the rear of the gills, just one fourth the whole length. From the front of the eye to the end of the lower jaw about one ninth the whole length. In the largest specimen the lower jaw projects one eleventh of an inch beyond the upper. I put the small one, six or seven inches long, in spirits.

Opening the larger, I found that it was a female, and that the ova were few and small as yet!! I also found that apparently its last food was another pickerel two thirds as big as itself, the tail end not yet digested. So it appears that you may dig a ditch in the river meadow, for the sake of peat, and though it have no other connection with brook or river except that it is occasionally overflowed, though only twenty or thirty feet long by three or four wide and one to three deep, you may have pickerel in it nine inches long, at least, and these live in part by devouring one another. 

Surely it cannot be many pickerel that the bigger ones find to devour there. You might think they would have more sympathy with their fellow-prisoners. This ditch, or these ditches—for I caught one in two ditches— have not been overflowed or connected with the brook or river since the spring of '57, I think, – certainly not any of them since last fall. 

Yet you may find a few sizable pickerel in such narrow quarters. I have seen them several together in much smaller and shallower ditches there, and they will bury themselves in the mud at your approach. Yet, opening one, you may perchance discover that he has just swallowed his sole surviving companion! 

You can easily distinguish the transverse bars a rod off, when the fish is in the water. 

Melvin says they get to weigh about two pounds.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 11, 1858

Wishing to get one of the little brook (?) pickerel, of Hubbard's ditches. See April 18, 1858 ("I saw in those ditches many small pickerel, landlocked, which appeared to be transversely barred! They bury themselves in the mud at my approach.")

Melvin says they get to weigh about two pounds. See April 21, 1858 ("Melvin says that those short-nosed brook pickerel are caught in the river also, but rarely weigh more than two pounds.")

See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Pickerel