The Wonderful World of Eels

Tidelines first worked with John, who teaches illustration at Plymouth University, back in 2021 where we worked with second year illustration students to explore themes of species diversity in the Estuary. Blog here. We’ve long been admirers of Guillemot Press and I was also curious to read Luke’s book, an exploration of the quest for interspecies communication called Domadomadoma – Blumblumblum : Conversations with other Animals. After facilitating the experimental Assembly of River Beings last year, I enjoyed reading this playful take on the poetry and pitfalls of our attempts to communicate and relate with other species. Luke will be reading from his book at 1.15pm on 13th July at the Festival (before the workshop).

We first started to think about eels on the Exe during lockdown when we convinced Finn our son to come out on moonlight nights to look for migrating elvers on Withycombe Brook in Exmouth. I had previously spied eel ladders on the brook so suspected they might be inhabitants of our local tributary. We didn’t find any that year but enjoyed our escapades and imaginings, and I subsequently met Andy Chadwick, ex-salmon fisher, who I interviewed for the first Salmon Run podcast. He is now the only remaining licenced eel fisher on the Exe.  Friend and illustrator Ione Maria Rojas has also caught the eel bug since she created an eel costume for the Assembly of River Beings. You can see one of her ink drawings in the Notebook pages.  I’ve also recently met with Vanessa from the Somerset Eel Recovery project. I heartily recommend looking up this project for inspiration and to find our more about how to restore habitats for this enigmatic species.  Big thanks to Exmouth Festival and Literature Works Seedbed fund for supporting this workshop. And here are John and Luke talking about what it is about eels..(all illustrations by John Kilburn).

What draws you to work with the ‘more-than-human’ world (other species)?
John:I’ve always been fascinated by nature – especially strange creatures. As a child, I spent a lot of time poking around in rock pools, catching prawns, fish, and loads of crabs. For a while, I lived by the estuary in North Devon, where I could crab fish right off the wall at the end of my garden. On a good day, I’d catch hundreds of crabs. At low tide, I’d go down to the beach and look under seaweed and rocks, discovering all sorts of unusual creatures.
Those experiences really stayed with me. And now, I find myself drawing a lot of strange creatures in my illustration work. I still go to the beach, look under rocks, and find things for inspiration.
I’m not quite sure where I end, or where the natural environment begins. The boundaries of being human – what makes me me – feel quite blurred. And within that blurring, there’s potential for ideas, thoughts, and sensations to move or permeate. I believe that we’re connected in a myriad of ways to the physical environment, the land, the plants, the creatures, the unseen and other-than-human.
Luke: It’s tricky to articulate, isn’t it. I agree with everything John’s said, although also note that John’s not altogether said what drew him to other animals, only that he has always been drawn to them. I don’t think I can do any better, but I’m really interested in this explanatory gap. It suggests at least part of the desire might be hard-wired and not wholly articulable. And it’s ancient. There are records of our desire to be connected with other species for as long as there have been records, along with a sense that once upon a time we really were connected. The story of Genesis and the ‘Fall of Man’ is essentially the same narrative as much modern nature writing: once we were connected, now we’re not. Beneath it is a desire to be connected and a feeling that we’re missing something important.
Like John, I’ve always loved other animals. I grew up with them, surrounded by them. Not eels so much, but just about everything else.

Why eels?
John: I have a lot of memories of European eels (Anguilla anguilla) from my childhood. Once, I hooked one by accident while crabbing.
I remember my brother catching one, too, but he was on his own and couldn’t bear to take it off the hook. Eels often swallow the hook right down into their stomachs, which makes it hard to remove. Sadly, that eel spent the rest of the holiday hanging on the side of a shed, slowly starting to smell.  I’ve always been fascinated by eels; the sliminess, the wriggling, the snake-like quality. That fascination deepened when I started talking to Luke about them. We realised we shared an appreciation of the strangeness of the species.
As we began researching and finding out more, we got drawn into their incredible life story, their natural history, their cultural impact. Across the world, eels have shaped traditions. They’ve been a food source, a form of rent, a creature of ridicule, absurdity, obscenity…
We invited people to send us their eel stories, poems, and artwork and by the overwhelming response it was clear that many others felt the same fascination. That’s how The Eel Suitcase was born.
Luke: I think ‘Why eels?’ is one of the most common questions I’ve had at eel-ish events, and I’m not completely sure how it happened, but I’m confident it’s all John’s fault. When we started talking about eels and how we might play with them as a creative subject we were in a pub in St Germans. As John says, the life cycle is extraordinary and the cultural history hugely surprising, but talking about eels can also be really funny. That first meeting I laughed so much I was crying. That combination of wonder and fun hooked me as deeply as John’s brother’s eel.

Do you know anything about the history of eels in the Exe?
John: I know quite a lot about the history of eels in general, though less about the specific history in the Exe. There would once have been a thriving eel fishery on the River Exe. I don’t know if there are any active commercial elvermen left now.
Luke: I know nothing about eels in the Exe and I hope some of the participants in our workshop are going to tell us lots about them. Everyone has an eel story! Eels have a remarkable life cycle, which you’ll talk more about in the workshop. When and where are we most likely to see eels?
John: There are times of year when you’re more likely to see them—when they swim upstream or begin their great migration back to the Sargasso Sea. But most of my encounters with eels have been by chance.
If you’re lucky, you might spot one from the bank of a stream or river. Once, I saw an otter, very near the centre of Bath, lying on its back, eating an eel like a hot dog.
People sometimes catch eels by accident in shallow pools while crabbing. I’ve also had students send me photos of eels they’ve found while rock-pooling, lifting rocks and finding these unexpected little creatures.
Luke: Outside of restaurants and smokeries, you’re mostly likely to see an eel in the mouth of a cormorant. I saw one of those quite recently on the Fowey.
But they live in just about any waterway – lakes, ponds, rivers – and they prefer the dark, so while they might be everywhere you’re unlikely to see them.
If you want to see the elvers – the tiny young eels that have hatched in the Sargasso Sea – they arrive on our shores late spring, and you might see them in great huddles entering the rivers and bundling upstream.

Why are eels important in UK rivers?
John: Eels are important for so many reasons. They’re a sign of a healthy ecosystem and play a key role in the food chain. Many animals eat them, and at every stage of their life cycle.
If we lost eels, we’d lose something really important – something primal. They’re a cornerstone species that many animals predate, but we’d also lose a deep human connection. Eels were once a vital food for the poor and became part of everyday stories, as well as folklore, woven into everyday life. Now they’re expensive and rare, and our connection to them is far thinner.
That’s a big part of what The Eel Suitcase is about; trying to reconnect people to the eel, to celebrate its extraordinary life story, its strangeness, its absurdity.
Luke: Yes, it seems slightly macabre to say they’re important because they’re food for other things, doesn’t it. They’re also useful scavengers and predators. They do so much to maintain that balance and health of our waterways.

Do you think eels have feelings?
John: I do think eels have feelings. They definitely have this collective instinct, an almost supernatural force, that drives them to travel in enormous numbers over 6,000 miles in their lifetime. What must that feel like? Burning ambition? Restlessness? A sense of adventure? Fear, even? There’s a David Attenborough film that shows an eel travelling at such great depths that it starts to asphyxiate, twisting and turning miles beneath the surface. It’s hard to imagine what that must be like – it seems so deep, alien, and unknowable.
Luke: A question slippery as the eel itself. By ‘having feelings’ we can mean a range of things, from simply having sensations like pain, which I don’t think would be controversial, to something like having an emotional life as complex as our own, which might be trickier to answer convincingly. I’m also wary that these questions are often really asking whether another animal feels in the same way that we (humans) do, and accompanying that ‘in the same way’ is a value judgement.
There have been some studies into the emotional lives of fish more broadly though, and historically there was an ancient Roman named Crassus who was very fond of his pet eel and apparently the eel used to come when it was called and was very affectionate towards him. When the eel died Crassus held a funeral for it and was mocked by all his friends.

If you were an eel, what would you say to humans?
John: I would scream or shriek something completely unintelligible and without meaning for as long and as loud as I possibly could.
Luke: I would not speak. That would give me away. I would slither up silently and devour them.

Can you share your favourite story about eels—fictional or otherwise?
John: There are some fun stories told by author and folklorist C.L. Nolan of the monstrous Eel Empress; a kind-of horse-eel-mermaid that goes around eating dead corpses in our rivers and consorting with witches and Marsh Apes…
Luke: Ooh, I didn’t know that one. I like it. My favourites are probably the real ones. Until very recently – the twentieth century – there was a mystery about eels. Nobody knew where they came from. Nobody knew where they were born or hatched or emerged or transformed, and there were loads of outrageous theories. One said they were born in the morning dew. Another said they emerged out of the guts of the earth. Yet another said that when one eel scratches itself against the rocks those flakes of eel skin become new eels. In the nineteenth century – one of the liveliest periods of cutting edge natural history – this guy showed up claiming he’d solved the problem. If I remember right, he was an engineer at a wool factory, and he said he’d solved it. He’d seen it for himself. Eels are born out of the arses of beetles.  John and I published that in a little book a few years ago, with these bonkers illustrations by John. Here’s some of them…