Whether you prefer the eastern crayfish, western crawdad, or the more southern crawfish  or mudbugs– you know summer is just around the corner when these little brown miniature lobsters are sharing toe space in the streams!

The boys spent the greater part of the fall with a morning routine of checking their traps to find two or three in the pot.  The last one that they found was a female crawdad with over 77 crawdad eggs tucked up underneath her tail in February.  CLICK HERE for Crayfish Egg Pictures

Since then the trap has come up empty.  We were told it was due to hibernation. This past Saturday we had company and the kids got the idea to reset the crawfish trap – our favorite crawfish bait is an open can of sardines.  The boys throw the trap off the dock into the freshwater of Devils Lake.  There are two streams that feed into the water near us, both to the north and to the south – which seems to be a habitat that the crawdads enjoy.

Today, just before our snake study, Nate came running up the dock screaming that crawdads had returned!  This was a huge one, with three inch claws and over 7 inches of body claw to tail. 

Wonder how many they will trap this year?

   
The claws and tail were very full of thick tasty meat.  Yum. 🙂