Who loves a leech? Not me, for sure. Neither the black (in reality a speckled olive-green) horse leeches that undulate, swift and purposeful, across the muddy bottoms of ponds, nor the paler fish leeches that plague the carp that rise out of the green depths of Llandrindod Lake. Here, a water bailiff transfers the carp to his keep-net and with a flick of his fingernail rids them of their unwanted parasites. There’s even a word, hirudinophobia, for that shuddery psychological dislike of these miniature vampires, about which the Book of Proverbs had this to say: “The horse leach hath two daughters, crying, ‘give, give’. There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, it is Enough!”
A medicinal leech sucks several times its own weight in blood before it falls off, returns bloated to its muddy home and does not need to feed again for weeks. They’re surprisingly common, present year-round, yet seldom seen. The first one I saw, when I was 12, was in Cheshire’s Dunham Park Lake. I looked down, appalled, into murky water at this dark, flat thing, a toothed mouth at both ends, speeding purposefully across the bed of the lake. The way leeches move is so sinister.
