Barton Creek Lobsters By Pat Gibson, Feb. 11, 1987

The crew has spent many hours on Barton Creek observing the wildlife. One weekend they had been wading with their dad and looking at what they could find under rocks. In poking around under the rocks in Barton Creek, they found several large crustaceans. The critters looked very much like miniature lobsters. Some of them had bodies more than four inches long. Now these critters were called crawdads in Colorado where I did a lot of my growing up. My husband, who grew up in the Valley, had a Spanish name for them. I had never seen a crawdad as big as those the crew had found on Barton Creek but they inspired my hubby. He wanted to have a crayfish boil.

Now I was not sure crawdads and crayfish were the same critter. We had been to a party several weeks before where the host boiled up a cooler full of Louisiana crayfish. These Barton Creek critters looked kind of like the things we had eaten, but they had not had heads.

One of our neighbors grew up in deep east Texas , near the Louisiana border so I called her. When she had quit laughing about my question, (I asked her if you could eat a crawdad.) she said yes. The crawdad and the crayfish were they same kind of critter. She was surprised we had found any big enough to eat. Raccoons are very fond of crawdads and usually catch them before they get big enough to interest people. I fixed a big pot of water with deep misgivings. Dropping a live critter into a pot of boiling water did not really appeal to me, but she said that was the way to cook them. My husband didn't let the crew watch them cook since they had caught them and were thinking of keeping them in a fish bowl.

We boiled them until they changed color, just like the neighbor instructed. I melted some butter since they were supposed to taste a little like lobster and you eat lobster with melted butter. It turned out to be pretty good eating. There was not really enough to be more than an appetizer, but we all got to taste crawdad or crayfish caught in Barton Creek.

Often we have caught things out here above Sulfur Creek but sometimes the things catch us, but that's another story.

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