Give the OP a break, he's probably too young to remember the wet years in the Panhandle, when crawdads were plentiful.
The farm where I grew up is just off of Callahan Draw, which feeds into Running Water Draw, which feeds into White River, which runs into the Salt Fork of the Brazos, and finally the Brazos.
So you can tell, we're pretty far upstream. In fact, the draw has probably only had enough water to flow less than 10 times in the last 100 years. But in the 60s when rainfall was higher, and irrigation pumping more abundant, the playa lakes up and down the draw had water year round. And they had crawdads. Like those above, we used to catch them by bending a nail, putting bacon on it, and getting them to grab it with their claws. Some guys came by once and caught a 30 gallon drum full of the things. They said they were going to eat them, I couldn't believe it.
The most annoying thing about the little boogers was their instinct to go upstream. We leased a farm on the draw one year. When we would furrow irrigate into the draw, those suckers would migrate back up the row, all the way to the irrigation ditch. Then they would crawl into the siphon tubes and plug them, so you'd have tubes stop and rows not watered. When they made it through the tubes, they'd burrow into the irrigation ditch and weaken it, sometimes causing breaks in the ditch.
With the marginal land going into CRP, especially that land sloping into playas, lower rainfall, and less and more efficient irrigation, few playas have water year round anymore. I've seen only a few crawdad chimneys in the last 4-5 years. They're about gone from this part of the world.
