What the heck is this????

Factual Questions
1

mysterious mound!

EEK! i discovered this in my back yard today. or should i say right off the edge of my concrete patio. the ground this thing sits on actually is owned by the condo association.

i don’t dare have friends over to sit outside until i know what i’m dealing with, here. i *suspect *a cicada killer wasp, but i’m not sure at all. can’t find any pix online that look anything like this.

help, fellow dopers. ID this thing for my peace of mind - or at least until i can call the association to come deal with whatever this is.

2

The link doesn’t seem to work.

Let’s see if this works better:

3

Looks like a weird kind of mole heap to me.

4

how did you do that? it’s been ages since i was on the dope. obviously i did the link incorrectly.

5

Are you anywhere near a body of water? If so, I’d guess it’s a crayfish mound.

6

Anthill with mange.

7

nope and nope.

8

It seems too good a match not to be this. My money would be on this, even if it’s far outside the normal geographic range and ecological niche for crayfish - they’re tenacious and invasive little buggers.

9

i thought i caught a glimpse of something scuttling back inside. i got an impression of wings, but it moved too fast to get a decent look at it. do crayfish have wings?

and now that i think of it, there a retention pond in my complex, but it’s a good 400 or 500 feet away from this mound. would they burrow that far away?

10

Look’s like a crayfish mound to me too. Is there a ditch nearby? Crayfish leave the water to make a nest like this.

11

Not wings, but the fan-like tail parts might give you that impression.

Could be. Only one way to find out - dig it up. Have a pan of boiling water ready, and some melted butter.

12

300 or 400 feet from standing water is plenty close enough, especially if there has been rain recently.

13

Looks like an ant hill, or termite hill.

14

Don’t know where you are, but I’ve never seen crayfish that far from water, and I’ve never seen them build in grass - always in muddy flats, usually within 10 feet of the water. Mind you, I’m in the midwest. Can you give a size estimate? A ruler next to it, perhaps?

15

About half of Moonshiner’s linked pictures show the mounds appearing in grass.

16

We used to get mounds exactly like this after a big rain. It was crawfish. We didn’t live anywhere near water. They did build mounds in the grass.

I know they were crawfish because we saw them. My poor cat tried to catch one and got pinched. We were mean, we laughed at him about it.

17

Yup, it’s a crawdad hole.

18

Crawdad.

19

Another vote for Crawdad. My BIL had those in his yard when he lived in Southern Illinois, and no water in sight.

20

Being from southern Louisiana, as soon as I saw the picture I thought: Crawfish hole.