Louisianans love their crawfish. Because crawfish, are a protein-rich staple food for Cajuns, herons, and other residents of the area, they are close to the heart. So many ways to fill the stomach! - bisque, gumbo, jambalaya, salad, étouffée, creole, fried, boiled, boulette, and so on. Crawfish festivals and crawfish boils are at the center of Louisiana celebrations. For many years, crawfish have been raised in collaboration with another local crop: rice. Rice and crawfish both both thrive in shallow water. They're grown side by side, and they're digested together in that gumbo and étouffée!

As a kid, I watched crawfish in the ditch in front of our house. There was always an inch or so of water down there, and if you crouched quietly above, out would sidle a crawfish or two. Uncooked, they are pale in color, and well camouflaged against the dirt at the bottom of the ditch. As an adult, I watched them in the wet weather creek in our neighborhood in central Texas. They were a little more visible against the limestone creek bed, and brought me great pleasure to watch. The water there when I'd see them was maybe two inches deep, very clear.

But crawfish don't just hang out in the water. Anyone who's lived in south Louisiana for long has seen the mud holes they construct. (Though the last one I've seen in a yard was in 2008.) In all my childhood, I can't say I ever saw crawfish actually building these - maybe they built at night. As an adult along the Texas creek in daylight, though, sometimes I watched a crawfish using his or her feet to build crawfish architecture right at the water's edge. They patted and stacked small balls of mud on a donut shaped foundation around a crawfish hole. These structures when complete look like a crumpled tower of crawfish footprints, six to 12 inches high. They are very sturdy once they dry out (like barn swallows' mud nests) with a round entrance to the hole and tunnel below. These would be near the ditch in our yard, and in the swampy grass area of the back pasture (along with two-foot-high ant hills in the early 1960s). Sometimes I stuck a stick straight down the hole - it would reach down maybe eight inches, a foot.

So familiar with crawfish, and yet I realize there's a lot I don't know. Are crawfish land animals or water animals? Do they breathe both under water and on land? How do they reproduce? What is the point of the mud structures? (My conjecture is that since ditches, creeks, and flood plains can flood, the tunnels perhaps are dug out in ways to keep the crawfish safe until the waters settle down. But that is just a thought - I don't know the answer. The towering part above ground may be just the dirt they dig out to make the tunnel, and might keep water from flooding through the entrance to the tunnel.)

Sometimes called mudbugs, crayfish, and freshwater or poor man's lobster, I think of crawfish as an abundant freshwater manna from heaven. They're an integral link in the network of life.