Life with Crawdads

Crawfish. Crawdads. Crayfish. Whatever they are. We got em.

A small (and I do mean SMALL) stream bends around our house.. curling all along the side of the house and perfectly around the front corner and all along the front yard before disappearing under the driveway and into the woods on the other side. Charming little stream. Ambience. We love it.

But shortly after we moved in, we noticed several holes along the creekbank. Then more holes. Then more holes. There are HUNDREDS of holes. What the heck ARE those holes? I'm thinking "oh please don't be snakes." Most were 1-2 inches in diameter... smooth and snakey looking. But there were so MANY of them! And some of them were HUGE! 5-6 inches in diameter! Small children tripped and fell, with their little feet caught way down in them. Horses could not be ridden along the creekbank for fear of a hoof plugging down into one of the larger ones and a leg snapping.

What lives in these holes?!?!?!?!? We never saw ANYTHING going into or coming out of them. And whatever they were, there must be HUNDREDS of them. Creepy thought, no matter WHAT they are!

Then a visiting farmer friend and his wife came over and I thought "AHA, HE will know!" So I dragged him down to the creekbank to show him our holes. He looked at me and dead seriously said "Hate to tell you this but those are cottonmouth snake holes". WHAT?!?!?!?!?! Then he laughed and said no, crawdads.

Funny. Very funny.

But geez those must be some HUGE crawdads.

Hubby, again a naive native of Germany where there are no crawdads, had a confused look on his face and headed inside to look up the creatures on the trusty Internet, source of all information.

Shortly after, I hear him shrieking facts he has unearthed about crawdads. "The largest reported crayfish is 6 feet long!!!!!", "they make hissing noises before attacking!!!!", "Even small crayfish can snap small twigs with their claws!!!!" and endless fun-to-know facts about the power in their claws. I tried to tell him that I have no idea where he got his info, but I'd never heard of such statistics and I'm sure they are perfectly harmless.

Still, I don't think he slept soundly for a week.

We also read you can tie tempting morsals of bologna or other bait onto a string and drop it from a stick into their hole and pull them out when they snap onto the bait! I have not yet convinced Timm that this would be a fun thing to try. We still haven't seen them yet.

Skunks, crawdads, what next?