Local Lens: A Block Club Intern’s Encounter With A Massive Carp

Local Lens is a series where Block Club Chicago explores the story behind the photograph. In this edition, photo intern Giacomo Cain talks about a recent nature-filled assignment.

O’HARE — Almost every summer of my childhood, I would take a weeklong trip to my family’s lake house, where I would spend much of that week fishing.

Pistakee Lake, the north suburban body of water where my family fishes, carries species of fish that are prevalent throughout Illinois: bass, bluegill, sunfish, catfish, perch and, of course, plenty of carp.

In all my years of fishing, I never got up-close with a carp. Carp are filter feeders that look for their food on the lake bottom — worms or other bait never appealed to them.

That all changed during a recent assignment on the Far Northwest Side — when reporter Molly DeVore and I watched forest preserve workers haul in a carp weighing over 90 pounds.

I’ve always been interested in marine life. So I was looking forward to making photos for DeVore’s story on a floating garden that was installed at Schiller Pond to help improve water quality.

When I arrived at the six-acre pond, I was greeted by Michael Feldmann, a friendly fisheries science technician with the Forest Preserves of Cook County. Feldmann gave me a crash course on the process of maintaining such a pond, and what he and his team would be working on that day.

My ears perked up when he mentioned electrofishing.

Feldmann showed me to the sub-20 foot aluminum boat with what looked like two chandeliers hanging from the front.

While DeVore, Block Club’s Northwest Side reporter, was interviewing Feldmann on the shore, Forest Preserves fisheries biologist Jim Phillips took me and the agency’s two interns, Arianna Marquez and Ian Waller, on the boat to do some electrofishing.

That day’s target: carp.

The carp that live in the pond are invasive and non-native to Illinois. They damage the pond’s ecosystem by releasing phosphates and nitrates when they feed on the bottom.

Marquez and Waller lowered the electrically charged, chandelier-like devices into the water and Phillips started the electrical current. Phillips explained that the current would stun the fish, which inflated their gall bladder and cause them to float the surface, where the interns would scoop them up with nets.

According to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, the average weight of a common carp is between two to five pounds.

The first 10 minutes yielded two or three moderately sized carp, which were stored in a tub on the boat.

Read more: This Floating Wetland Near O’Hare Is Working To Improve Water Quality On The Northwest Side

We went down to the other end of the pond, and that’s when it happened: The largest fish I had ever seen floated to the top.

It flopped and fought before eventually surrendering.

Phillips shut off the electrical current to let Waller and Marquez haul it in safely. After two attempts with the biggest nets they had, the gargantuan fish was brought aboard.

When we hauled it back to shore, a crowd quickly gathered around to get a glimpse of the beast.

Feldmann and Waller hoisted it onto shore to give everyone a good look before giving DeVore an opportunity to feel the weight of the monster.

Due to the size of the fish, it had to be sent away to be inspected. There, it was revealed that it was a Big Head Carp that weighed 91.4 pounds and was 4-feet-3-inches long.

Feldmann and Phillips told us that this was the seventh carp of this size that they had hauled out of this pond alone, and that it has likely been around since the ’90s. Such massive carp have been found in other local ponds, including in Humboldt Park’s lagoon, where an angler reeled in a 72-pounder in 2023.

As I normally do when I see something out of the ordinary, I documented the entire effort with photos and videos. The sky was clear and the sun was bright, making it easy for me to get action shots of the interns hauling in the fish.

Getting photo and video side-by-side, however, proved to be more difficult. Looking through my camera’s viewfinder, I prioritized the photos while holding my phone recording video and praying that I was get all the details in frame.

We came back with enough photographic evidence to convince the newsroom of how we helped reel in a pond monster after an hours-long battle.