Once a nuisance, alligator gar increasingly protected

Image source: Houston Chronicle

When the Trinity River, swollen from heavy spring rains, oozed over its banks along its lower reaches and spread over the adjacent landscape, as it almost annually did back when I was a teenager, we’d wait maybe a week, load the bed of the pickup with No. 2 washtubs and 20-foot “minnow” seines and head to the flooded river.

We’d wade the shallows where the swelled Trinity had inundated acres of grasses and shrubs, make drags with the seine and reap a red, tail-snapping harvest of crawfish. We easily filled three or four of the 15-gallon galvanized tubs with huge “swamp reds.”

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Source: Houston Chronicle