When I was a kid we’d take a chicken neck, tied a piece of kite string to it, and go on down to the crawdad hole over at the creek. Lower the chicken neck to the bottom and wait a few minutes til we felt a slight vibration and tugging of a wiley crayfish gnawing away. Patiently and very slowly we’d pull up the chicken neck and dip a small net made of chicken wire underneath and scoop up the crawdaddy. We’d repeat this over the course of a warm Saturday afternoon until we’d filled up a couple gallon bucket.
We’d head home where Mama would throw them in a pot of rice, beans and sausage seasoned perfectly with the trinity of onion, celery and green bell pepper. My lord the aroma coming out of that kitchen would have everyone to drooling.
Now-a-days, we don’t have time to sit there and dangle a chicken neck from a piece of string. Instead we build some or buy some crawfish traps, bait them with fresh chicken, or catfood, and put them down in very same crawdad holes we used to fish when we were kids. Leave the traps overnight, and first thing in the morning we collect the traps, and empty them into the same plastic buckets we used to use. Difference is the amount of time we spend actually doing the catching is pretty much equal to zip, zero, nada.
And Mama is still in the kitchen cooking us up a mess of crawfish.
Life is good.