All it takes to seed a pond with crawdads is a few berried females. They tend to have eggs (berries) in the spring only. If you have other BOW's with crawdads in them, start trapping about mid march and look for eggs under their tail. Move the ones with eggs to your new pond. I'd say 20-30 berried females per acre would be a good number to shoot for. This approach will add hundreds of crawdads to the pond and allow them to balance themselves naturally.
I would advise to wait, however, until you have adult predator's. I learned the hard way and stocked my pond with hundreds of adult crawdads (1-3" long) at the same time I was growing the stocked fish...the crawdads were too big for the small stocked fish to eat and the crawdads multiplied significantly and kept growing to reach 5 inches long. They stayed ahead of the mouth gape of my stocked fish and I ended up with too many crawdads. The water is muddy from them and I have difficulty getting any vegetation to grow in the water.
Do your research and do not stock non-native crawdads. Besides the legal aspect of it, non natives can change your local ecosystem.
If you are wiling to travel, I suspect I will start trapping out crawdads in a couple weeks and there should be berried females in the traps by the end of March. Otherwise, I have trapped all summer long for the last 2 years and should have plenty to give away. So, keep an eye open for my "Crawdads...Free to a Good Home!" thread located here....
https://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=538894&page=1What crawdads don't go to Pond Boss members to help stock their ponds get....eaten.
