Crawfish Trapping Tips

Should answer your questions.

Louisiana Crawfish Production Manual. Chapter 8 - Harvest

Crawfish Trap Design and Construction.

Not hard to make some pillow traps and test run them.

I have access to an 80 acre borrow pit. It's public. Flat shallow lake. They took the dirt out of it to build the Port of Grand Gulf in the 1970s. That's where I set my catfish slat boxes. And they had crawfish in them.

And it's not really to be economically viable. It's more something to do with the kids. If I could set 5-10 traps and come back a week later and get 15-20 pounds that would be a huge success.

I'm curious if anyone had used the traps available on Amazon. Or if I need to build my own.

We use pogey mostly or shad. (pond operation)

quote:

---

Also, what do people use for bait?

---

Beef melt. Can usually find it in frozen blocks in grocery stores during crawfish season.

quote:

---

I have access to an 80 acre borrow pit. It's public. Flat shallow lake. They took the dirt out of it to build the Port of Grand Gulf in the 1970s

---

no thats not how it works, you cant leave crawfish traps out for days, they would all be dead, plus people would steal them

you set the traps in the evening and raise them the next morning, or you set early morning and raise that evening

its not like crab traps that you can leave for a day or two

that said, speaking of crabs, it sounds like you have enough area there to support a good crab population as well, do they have crabs for the kids to have fun catching?

if not, have you thought about going catch a bushel or two of crabs to turn lose in there? crabs live fine in salt or fresh water so it doesnt matter where you get them from

I’ll assume that the crawfish you caught in the slat traps are either red swamp crawfish or white river crawfish and not one of the many other species, smaller size, that people occasionally will catch.

Though you could try a few of the traps sold on Amazon - they are cheaper than I thought - might be best to make a few pillow traps of your own to try. Get 3/4 inch hexagonal mesh galvanized chicken wire, either 24, 36, or 48 inches in height, cut pieces about 48 inches or 54 inches long, roll into a cylinder and use small hog rings (you’ll need hog ring pliers) to close the cylinder, then on one end hog ring about 1/2 to 2/3 rd of the end closed and leave the other portion “open” to add bait and remove crawfish. That partially open end can be manually closed with a clothes line pin or folded over after adding bait. The other end you will hog ring closed except leaving 1 1/2 or 2 inches open and in those 2 open ends place a coke bottle neck, and push inward at a 45 degree angle to form an inverted funnel, as illustrated in fig 7 of the article I posted. Now you’ll have a pillow trap that looks like the one in Fig 1. You can “mash” them nearly flat for transport. Easy to do and a fun project. This should be pretty cheap if you can buy the galvanized wire by the linear foot, and not an entire roll. Good hardware store should have all you need.

Bait - shad, menhaden (pogy), cut carp or buffalofish are the best crawfish baits, but you could use catfish carcasses, tins of cat food with holes punched in them.

I’d try not to leave the traps set for more than 2 to 3 days - much longer than that and a high percentage of crawfish that enter the trap will escape out of the same funnels they entered.

Have fun - the kids should enjoy it, but keep your expectations in check as any permanent body of water that doesn’t dry out will likely have predatory fishes that eat crawfish, so the crawfish population would not be expected to be high, but sometimes you can hit an unexpected “jackpot”.

On soak time

I used to let me soak for a week. The small crawfish get out but the big ones stay in.

However, when they run out of food they will cannibalize each other.

My best runs last year were 2 day soaks

quote:

---

CrawDude

---

Great detailed information. Many thanks.

We get our pyramids for like $10 I think it was