Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (23 page)

A motley assortment of fishermen brought in their boats. When I asked them, they told me that, yes, they’d hooked snakeheads on the river from time to time. None of them had been after snakeheads and none had bothered to report his catch. One guy had actually thrown his fish back alive.

This sounded promising. I looked for a spot along the bank where I could cast past the many yards of green scum that floated near shore. Banned from the floating dock, I didn’t have many options.

I considered what lure to use; despite the online forums, there hadn’t been much information on the subject. Most people seemed to get snakeheads on bass fishing tackle, so I started with an old bass fisherman’s standby, the red rubber worm.

A long cast sent it way out, and I began my retrieve as soon as it hit the water. I reeled slowly. When the worm was almost in, lying in the water no more than seven feet from me, a large blur dropped out of the sky from behind me and landed on the lure in a confusing mass of brown-and-white feathers.

I had no idea what was happening.

Then I realized that what I was looking at was an osprey that had pounced on my lure. I’d heard of clever ospreys learning to grab fish from lines as fishermen reeled them in, but rubber worms from a hook?

Great,
I thought as the osprey flailed about at the end of the line,
I’ve caught myself an osprey and it’s gotten itself hooked. I’ll have to get it off somehow without getting my eyes gouged out or being ticketed by Fish and Wildlife.

It struck the water and sent spray into my face, then it was back in the air, without carrying off either my rod or me. The hook was still in the water and the rubber worm was gone. I stared at the sky, slack-jawed, for at least a minute.

Sensible people would have found another place to fish. On the other hand, sensible people don’t decide at two in the morning to drive for hours on I-95 to sleep in a tent and catch an invasive Frankenfish that had been reported only once in the area.

I kept fishing that spot. Half an hour later I had my first bite from something other than a federally protected raptor. It was a fish, though not a big one. I worked it in, not clear on when to set the hook. As it zigzagged its way toward shore, I saw its outline once it got to ten feet from the water’s edge. The long dorsal fin suggested either a snakehead or a native bowfin.

Before I could determine what it was, once again a feathered torpedo hit the water and once again the son of a bitch nabbed what was on the hook and flew off with it before I could grasp what was happening. This one left the lure, though.

Sunset was approaching and the mosquitoes were coming out in force. I wound in my line and went back to my tent.

That night, my campsite was raided by a bunch of raccoons that stole a couple of crab traps, presumably for the sake of some leftover bits of chicken necks still clinging to the wire. In the morning, I looked for the traps but in vain. Those animals at Pohick Bay Regional Park are a bunch of thieves, and maybe liars and tax cheats, too.

After I broke camp, I drove the few miles to Mason Neck State Park, which I’d been aiming for all along, and parked near the nature center. A park ranger was walking toward his truck, and I quickly intercepted him.

Did he know anything about snakeheads in the area? Officer Timothy C. Smith told me I’d come to the right place, and he directed me to a pond some four hundred yards away.

This pond, he promised me, was full of snakeheads. People caught them now and then, but no other fish larger than a minnow swam in it. I asked him what kind of tackle people used, and he suggested a top-water lure that could be skipped over the plentiful muck and weeds.

All righty, then. I grabbed my gear and hauled it down to the pond. It was a small body of water, less than half an acre, but it was connected to the river via a small inlet, a stream of perhaps a dozen yards. At high tide this stream filled and the river washed into the pond. A sort of boardwalk ran along one side of the pond.

My rod was a light Shakespeare Uglystik with a cheap reel that I’d used for bass and bluegill, loaded with eight-pound test line. I rigged a wooden top-water lure with a couple of treble hooks on it and cast into the middle of the pond, home of the least amount of pond scum to snag the hooks.

Within a second, I had a great almighty bite. This fish nailed the lure with incredible force and ran with it like a tarpon. I was stunned at the ferocity with which something had grabbed the lure. This didn’t feel like any largemouth bass I’d ever hooked.

The fish fought hard and I fought back. I strained at it, tightened up the drag, and cranked the reel. I was becoming dangerously smug. On the very first cast I’d caught a fish! I could bring it in, kill it, put it on ice, and go home. Mission accomplished!

Only not so much. I had it in close enough that I could see it was definitely a snakehead. Then it did a sort of sideways flip, bit through the line, and disappeared. I was left with a sadly chomped-off length of fishing line and an open mouth.

My first thought was:
I’m going to need a bigger rod.
Back in the car I only had one other fishing rig, my saltwater rod and reel, a nice Shimano Sonora 5000 on a stiff two-piece rod and loaded with a sixteen-pound test. Maybe the heavier line would hold up better . . . I wouldn’t be able to cast that rod with precision, though.

The only top-water lure I’d brought was gone for good, so I spent the rest of the day fishing with various inappropriate lures with, not surprisingly, no luck. I saw plenty of snakeheads once the wind picked up and blew the pond scum to one side. Their long, prehistoric-looking, almost reptilian bodies were clearly visible when they basked near the surface.

Other than the snakeheads, I didn’t see a single fish longer than two inches. Every fish that belonged in that pond was gone, except for smaller fry that had probably washed down in the stream that fed the pond or come in from the river at high tide. The only other moving life were thousands of tadpoles, hundreds of frogs, and dozens of turtles. Ominously, one of the turtles was missing a leg.

Tim, the park ranger, showed up to see how I was doing.

“What are these fish still doing here?” I asked. “Can’t you get DGIF [the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries] or someone else to come in and electrofish them out?”

“We tried,” Tim said with a sigh. “We put in a request to DGIF a year ago and they didn’t want to come out. They just said to let people fish them out.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“So you’re saying the state knows this pond is here, full of snakeheads, and has decided to do nothing about it?”

“Pretty much.”

I realized as the day wore on that I was badly armed. The situation called for a stiff, sturdy rod with a good reel, but lighter and with more finesse than my surf rod. I needed something that would let me cast carefully to avoid the tangles of weeds and the fallen tree mid-pond that snarled and stole lures from bad casts. I also needed a high-test line and steel leaders that could resist the sharp teeth of a snakehead. Finally, I needed weed-bucking top-water lures that wouldn’t get tangled up on pond scum with every cast. The best look like what was probably a snakehead’s favorite meal — a frog.

That day I was skunked, but I came away with good plan to land a snakehead. I made the long drive home and the next morning ordered a rod, a reel, and various accoutrements. A week later, I had a proper snakehead rig and again set out to land a snakehead.

I also did more research on the snakehead’s feeding behavior. I wanted to know exactly how it hit a lure, its favorite foods, and when it was likely to be hungry. I’d fallen into the classic trap of the modern hunter or fisherman: So obsessed with gear, locations, and tactics, I hadn’t focused on the animal itself.

There were scads of videos of snakeheads feeding in aquariums. I watched them repeatedly and noticed that a snakehead doesn’t usually hit its prey in the same way a largemouth bass does. Like most fisherman from the southern and eastern parts of the country, I was stuck in the bass-fishing mind-set. A bass swallows its prey whole, in one big gulp. It has no teeth, nor does it need any. A snakehead will sometimes swallow small prey whole, but it’s also willing to go after a meal that’s far too big to gulp down. It’s prone to grabbing the tail end of a prey animal with its sharp teeth and twisting its body rapidly in order to tear off a chunk. Deprived of a tail or hind legs, the victim probably isn’t going anywhere. The snakehead then takes its time savoring the meal.

The pond I’d been fishing was perfect snakehead habitat. These fish don’t care for an environment like the open water of the Potomac. As lunging ambush predators, they’re built for a sudden burst of speed from thick cover. They prefer an area with thick weeds, tall grass, and vegetation so dense that you’d find it difficult to believe any fish could be in it.

In late spring and early summer, both snakehead parents will guard anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds of their small, bright-red young. Normally, a youngster needs good camouflage, but perhaps the bright color of a baby snakehead helps its parents keep track of and guard it. This advantage balances its increased visibility to predators. Any invader that approaches a young snakehead will be attacked viciously by the parents. This protective behavior accounts for many of the horror stories of snakehead attacks reported by the media.

Their habits as devoted parents can be exploited during the right season, though. That instinct to attack whether or not the parent fish is hungry makes it easy to catch during spawning season.

Unfortunately, I had arrived too late; the young were grown and had dispersed.

Once again I camped at Pohick Bay. I woke up at dawn to drive to Mason Neck. I brought an array of top-water lures to try out, including something called a Scum Frog.

After some experimentation, I found that the Scum Frog was the only lure in my tackle box to work. Now that I knew what sections of the pond the snakeheads were likely to haunt, I cast repeatedly into muck and snags I never would’ve imagined trying to fish. The Scum Frog has a pair of large hooks with their tips blocked by the soft rubber of the frog’s body. A pair of rubber legs dangle behind. The design works well enough that I could drag the lure through muck without getting snagged and without having to remove the half a pound of weeds other lures brought in.

The hits began. I’d get a bite, move to set the hook, start bringing in the line, and in a flash the fish would be gone.

Park staff came to see what was going on with the crazy guy trying to catch snakeheads. They all had stories.

I was intrigued by the account of Trevor Via. As a land maintenance ranger at Mason Neck, he has spent a lot of time outside. Officially, if you recall, nobody in Virginia has caught more than two snakeheads within a calendar year. Trevor says he caught three in a single day out of that very pond, which must give him the state record, unofficial though it is.

On that day, Trevor caught the first of the three on a bare hook. The surface was mostly clear of duckweed and muck, and he could see a number of snakeheads hanging around near the surface. He cast, hoping to snag a fish through the side of the body and then drag it in. But he missed his mark. As he reeled in the line, the hook passed in front of a snakehead and the fish lunged at it. Trevor hooked that fish on a six-pound-test line with a light, whippy rod, and the battle was on.

His fight to land the snakehead would have been shorter if he’d had a heavier line. A thicker, stronger line makes it easier and faster to reel in a fish. In spite of its designation, however, it’s possible to land a ten-pounder on six-pound line. The fight will take longer, and without some finesse on the part of the angler, the line can be broken.

Trevor said he spent a solid half hour fighting that snakehead all over the pond before managing to bring it to shore.

The park staff also busted a myth I’d heard time and again: that mature snakeheads in the United States don’t have any predators. I spoke with people who said they watched as ospreys grabbed the adult fish from just beneath the water’s surface. After what I witnessed of thieving ospreys a few miles away, I had no doubts. Even at the corner of the pond where I was fishing now, there’s a tree with bare branches on which ospreys perch, looking down at the water in search of fish.

This predation is not heavy enough to stop the rapid expansion of snakeheads, but it’s something. Perhaps in ten or twenty years ospreys and bald eagles will have evolved to specialize in hunting adult snakeheads.

I fished from various spots around the pond. Now and then, a snakehead would come up for an instant to gulp air or lunge at some type of prey. Usually this activity was near the shore or in waters surrounding a fallen tree. By midday, I started to notice some odd things. For example, the bullfrogs didn’t act like bullfrogs. Usually, when you approach one by the water’s edge in daylight, it jumps into the water when you get close. These frogs didn’t do that. I could get to within five feet before they bolted. It was as if they thought whatever was waiting for them in the water was more dangerous than I was.

At around two, I was watching a goldfinch perched on a branch of the mostly submerged tree in the center of the pond. I took a few pictures, then it flitted to another twig only a few inches from the surface. The water suddenly erupted. Something big and dark seized the goldfinch and disappeared under the water.