No utensils required

On the very rare occasions that I have attended posh restaurants (probably when I was trying to impress my girlfriend – now wife) I have found that if you order any seafood dish, you are confronted with a bewildering array of cutlery with which to dismember, probe and extract the meat from said seafood. Combine these with the separate cutlery for the appetiser, entrée, main meal, dessert and petit-fours and you have enough silverware to sink a Spanish galleon.

Life does not have to be that complicated. Pictured left is a Rakali (Hydromys chrysogaster) dining on a freshwater yabby from our dam. No serviettes, no cutlery. Just dive in and select your crustacean, drag it to the shore and eat the delicacy tail-first while the claws are still snapping. If you look closely you can see the yabby claw hanging down. It’s pretty gruesome but I guess that’s nature at work. Rakalis tend to have a dining platform or area where they prefer to dine each time.

After the repast had been completed I walked down to the shore of the dam and viewed the remains of the carnage. It looked like Christmas had come in July – nothing left but Sandy Claws.