Northern pike are highly prized game fish due to their size, strength and fighting ability. These predatory creatures are elongated fish with large heads and duckbill jaws with sharp, pointed canine teeth. The dark green shading of their back makes them almost invisible from above.

Their light green sides, with bean-shaped yellow spots, white belly, and dark-spotted, orange-red fins distinguish the northern pike from all other game fish.

Pike are proven wanderers and hunters. One scientist referred to these fish as "mere machines for the assimilation of other organisms." Northern pike don't restrict their diet to fish. Their diet can include leeches, frogs, tadpoles, crayfish, snails, freshwater shrimp and dragonfly nymphs, up to mice, aquatic birds, even muskrats.

Although yellow perch and suckers are the northern pike's preferred food, the general rule is that their food of preference is whatever's most abundant at the moment, including brothers, sisters, cousins and carrion. It's no wonder that in the right habitat, northern pike can grow to more than three feet long, achieve weights of more than 20 pounds, and are documented to live up to 24 years.

SEASONAL DRIFTS
Northern pike vary quite widely in weight, depending on the time of year. A pike caught in early May, just after spawning season, is tired and worn and may weigh only 15 pounds. The same pike caught in late summer or early fall can weigh as much as 25 pounds because it has fed all summer and is in prime shape.

The feeding range of these pike is extensive, covering more territory than any other game fish and preferring different habitats at different times of year. In winter, they will move to deeper waters, following the oxygen and food supply. As the ice goes out, they migrate to streams to spawn and then return to the deeper water until the air and water temperatures rise.

On warm spring days they head to the shallow, sandy, reed-bed bays to soak up the sun. As the summer progresses and heats up, these predators will take cover in deeper weedbeds to keep cool and ambush their prey. As the chill of autumn approaches, these fish return to the sandy, shallow bays. Like white-tailed deer, northern pike are also approaching peak physical condition as summer comes to a close.

The old adage, "Use big lures for big fish," holds true for pike. Just ask Great Sacandaga Lake fisherman Mike Buyce. A lifelong resident of Mayfield, Buyce has lived on the shore of Great Sacandaga Lake all his life. And he's been fishing this lake almost all of his 56 years, always aware of Peter Dubuc's 46-pound, 2-ounce northern pike landed in 1940.

Whether it was carp with a bow and arrow, bobbers and worms for sunfish, or rock bass and yellow perch off the dock, Buyce took to the sport of fishing at an early age. During his career, he has caught all of the principal fish in Great Sacandaga Lake including walleyes, smallmouth bass, bullheads, rainbow and brown trout. But his encounters with northern pike were always incidental while fishing for the other, more abundant species in the lake.

THE LURE OF PIKE
In the late 1990s, Buyce was at the mouth of a stream, fishing for post-spawn pike with 12-inch suckers on a 6-foot leader and a bobber. Suddenly his large bobber sank beneath the surface.