Missouri River Crawfish

[David Unnerstall]

I live on a creek that flows into the Mississippi river from North St. Louis County. I had to do some landscaping on it in '08 and was pleased to find a crawdad.

[LarrySTL]

When I was a kid we lived in Kirkwood. Not the part that was then almost rural, but the part near Glendale and near Webster and what few creeks were around were more like drainage ditches. Usually five feet wide, eight inches deep, lots of mud bottoms, lots of glop in them, occasional foul smells. There were crawdads in there.

One summer I went to camp way way out in the boonies.....Baldwin...it was rural then, corn and horses werent everywhere, but were not unusual. The camp was slightly north of Manchester and, from memory, maybe 1/2 mile west of 141. There was a drainage ditch through it and if its still visible, its the one that goes under Manchester around there. It had LOTS of crawdads, including a decent number of big ones.

I suspect that other than removing all the water, a crawdad population tends to be quite resilient.

[Old plug]

The big pools at the entrance to Shaw' Garden were full of crawfish when I was a kid. We used to catch them on bacon to fish in in the lake in the back of the garden. At that time there was nothing back there and the lake was a good place to fish.

Gosh does that bring back memories!!!. I have been throw out if there so many time for fishing they finally suspended me. Or thought they did anyway. A few years ago I drove around in back and they still have the same old chain link fence and the hole we made through it to get into the lake was still there.