Fish
Chain Pickerel
Esox niger · also called chain pike, jack fish
Push a canoe along a weedy shoreline in a New England pond and a green shape may bolt out from under the lily pads in a swirl of mud. That is a chain pickerel, the pocket-sized member of the pike family, doing the only thing it really does — ambushing whatever swims by.
Overview
Esox niger has the classic pike shape: a long, cylindrical body, a flattened duck-bill snout full of needle teeth, and the dorsal and anal fins set far back near the tail for a fast standing start. It is green to bronze on the flanks with a bold dark chain-link pattern and a straight dark bar below each eye. Most weigh well under 1.4 kg, making it the smallest of the three North American pikes.
Ambush, not chase
The chain pickerel is a lie-in-wait predator. It holds motionless in reeds, pads, and drowned brush, camouflaged by its pattern, then strikes with a short explosive burst. Its diet is mostly other fish — sunfish, minnows, young perch, even smaller pickerel — with frogs, crayfish, and the occasional surface-taken mouse or small snake added by larger individuals.
The winter fish
Unlike bass and most sunfish, chain pickerel stay active in cold water and under ice. That makes them a reliable target for winter and early-spring anglers across the north-east, where they are valued for a savage strike and a hard first run on light tackle, despite flesh that is riddled with fine Y-shaped bones.
Status
The chain pickerel is Least Concern and secure across its native Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain range. If anything it is spreading, carried into new waters by anglers as bait or by stocking, rather than declining anywhere.
Chain Pickerel: common questions
How is a chain pickerel different from a pike?
They are close relatives in the same genus, Esox, but differ in size and detail. The chain pickerel is the smallest of the group, usually under 60 cm, while a northern pike can pass a metre and a muskellunge can approach two. The chain pickerel has fully scaled cheeks and gill covers, a chain-link pattern on the flanks, and a straight dark bar under the eye. The northern pike has light bean-shaped spots on a dark background and a scaleless lower half to the gill cover. All of them share the same long body, back-set fins, and duck-bill jaws full of teeth.
Are chain pickerel good to eat?
The flesh is white, flaky, and mild, and many anglers rate the flavour highly, but the fish is notoriously bony. Like the pike and muskellunge, it has an extra row of small, forked intra-muscular bones along the flanks that are not connected to the backbone and cannot simply be lifted out with the frame. Cooks deal with them either by careful filleting that removes the bone row as a strip, or by scoring the fillets finely so the small bones soften when fried. Larger pickerel are easier to bone than small ones.
Where and how do you catch chain pickerel?
Look for shallow, weedy water — lily pads, reed beds, flooded timber, and the edges of grass mats in lakes, ponds, and slow rivers. Pickerel sit tight in this cover and ambush anything that swims past, so lures and flies that move erratically past the weed edge draw hard strikes, and spinnerbaits, spoons, jerkbaits, and streamers all work. A wire or heavy fluorocarbon leader is wise because the teeth cut light line. They feed well in cold water, so pickerel fishing stays productive through winter and early spring when bass and other species are dormant.
Do chain pickerel hybridise with other pickerels?
Yes. Where their ranges overlap, the chain pickerel crosses with the redfin pickerel and the grass pickerel, which are the two subspecies of the smaller Esox americanus. The hybrids show intermediate markings and are sometimes mistaken for unusual pure chain pickerel. Hybridisation is limited by differences in preferred habitat and spawning timing, but it happens often enough in shared ponds and swamps of the eastern United States that it is well documented. The chain pickerel does not naturally hybridise with the northern pike or muskellunge in the wild.