National Crawfish Day – April 17
Let’s celebrate National Crawfish Day with an adventure. Everyone knows about finding crawdads in creeks and ditches, but did you know you could catch one in a hole in the ground with a string and some bacon?
Many years ago we saw some funny looking chimneys made of mud in the back yard of our new home. Not knowing what they were, we asked around and were told that they were made by crawdads that lived under the ground. I often wondered if I could catch one with some bait on a string, but I never got around to trying it. Many years later in a different house and a different town, and after a long soaking rain, some mud chimneys popped up in our ditch.
Perfect timing. Wondering what I might write about for today’s blog post I learned that April 17th was National Crawfish Day. It was time to do something that had been on my bucket list for over 40 years. I set out to catch a crawdad in a crawdad hole in our ditch with a piece of string and a short slice of bacon tied to the end of it. Check out my pictures!
The image on the left is a larger mud chimney from the back yard. The center picture is me fishing in another crawdad hole where I got more nibbles, and the third picture is the crawdad I caught in the hole in the second picture. I could have cooked and eaten it, but since I only caught one, I returned it back to its hole along with the rest the bacon from the string.
These freshwater critters go by many names: crayfish, crawfish, crawdads, craydids, crawdaddies, mudbugs, and yabbies. All are crustaceans and very similar to the shrimp. The crayfish found in holes like the ones in my yard are referred to as burrowing crayfish. They are found in many parts of the USA in low lying moist ground where the water table is close to the surface.
Burrowing crawfish are nocturnal, so unless you coax them out of hiding with some bait on a string, you probably won’t see one. They dig their burrows in wet soil and pile up little mud balls on the top of the ground around their hole to make their mud chimneys. I like to think of burrowing crawfish as little knights in armor, and their mud chimneys are their castles.
It took me about three hours to catch my crawdad. If I’d been smarter, I would have looked on YouTube where I would have found this video made by nitro3899 telling how to catch them. I might have caught mine and maybe a couple more in about a half an hour, but I didn’t know to fill the hole with water or to grab the crawdad with needle nose pliers. My crawdad wouldn’t stay on the bait all the way out of the hole, until I eventually wore it out.
Now that you know what to look for, keep some string and needle nosed pliers handy for when you chance to find some mud chimneys. Let your children or grandchildren join you on your adventure.
Blog post by Janice D. Green, owner of Honeycomb Adventures Press, LLC
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The photo at the top of the page is by Stone Wang on Unsplash.