Crawdads

Appetizer of crawdads. I dipped the meat in a little olive oil and salt. Mmmmmh! The tail is where most of the meat is. Like a tiny lobster. The claws contain a small amount of meat too and some crawdads have huge claws. Notice how red the shells get after boiling compared to how dark brown they are when alive in the trap. As you may have read in my previous posts, I am currently exploring some less conventional methods of obtaining meat. Part of this interest is in discovering viable day to day sources of fat and protein that have been consumed by humans for millions of years, but that our culture turns it's nose up at, i.e. insects, rodents, small birds, mollusks. I consider this to also be research into practical methods of obtaining food in long-term survival situations.

I set this homemade trap in the morning and caught 6 by 5 pm. I made the trap a couple days ago from some wire mesh (I think they call this stuff "hardware cloth) It's similar to some other crawdad and minnow traps I've seen. I used some chicken bones from the previous nights dinner as bait.

Last summer I started constructing a crawdad trap from maple branches twined together with split cedar roots. It's almost complete. I just need to make the cone for the other side. This is a sort of labor intensive style of trap but I imagine it will be just as effective as the metal one. Might need to weight it with some rocks to get it to sink.