Blue Crabs
First things first... Many heartfelt thanks to our veterans.
Next, The Great Backyard Bird Count is due for Feb. 13 - 16. We strongly recommend that you take part. It's free, easy, and fun.
Onward...
For me, the worst part of writing these posts are the pics. Once I've got a decent photo, the words flow naturally. But picking a shot ain't easy, and sometimes I just give up in disgust and go to bed. Not tonight. No matter how non-bird, you're going to get an entry. Be thankful ya ain't getting a photograph of a 1972 Evinrude boat motor with a blanket wrapped around it.
That being said, the fellow above is a blue crab (Callinectes sapidus). The wife spotted him whilst exploring Bass River in her kayak. My family and I go back a long way with the lowly blue crab. As a little kid, I remember using a dip net to catch them, and steaming a mess of 'em in a cheap, chipped, blue/black enamel pot along with seasoning, corn and beer. Unless memory is completely shot, the pot had small white splotches. (It's funny the things a person retains over 45 years.) I also recall that eating those guys was a slow, punctilious affair at best. They were nothing like lobsters - you could pluck and suck the meat out of those big guys in an hour or so. The crabs took a lot longer to make a meal. In retrospect, it seemed like the crustaceans were almost a perpetual meal - the amount of food energy produced by blue crab meals was always pretty much offset by the energy needed to catch, cook, and eat the little buggers.
Nowadays, about the only exposure I have with the blue crab is the ubiquitous empty carapace picked clean out on the clam flat by one of the local gulls. (Odds are that it doesn't take a Herring gull or his brethren the Great black-backed, Ring billed or Laughing Gull nearly as long to eat one as it used to take me.)
I really should go crabbing again, but I believe there may be better game afoot... Crawfish! Now we're talking. And no stinkin' gull is going to devour a bowl full of steaming mud bugs faster than yours truly...
See you by the feeders,
CapeCodAlan
P.S. Why is it that no matter where we start with these posts, we almost always end up talking about birds?
eBirdseed.com photo library
