Sonnier's Shed of Snakes

Here is the feed room in our barn. The brown plastic bins on the right contain, beginning with the first one, Dairy Ration for the cows and goats.  The middle bin has Laying Pellets for the hens and the last bin contains rice for the chickens.  The black bin in the back left contains Alfalfa "mulch" for the cows and the yellow bins in front of it contain extra storage for Laying Pellets.  The feed room is not really neat and orderly and needs to be cleaned up and organized.  Of course that will take place when it is about 30 degrees cooler.

Yesterday as I was pouring Laying pellets into the yellow bins, I moved the top one out of the way to begin pouring into the bottom one.  As I moved them, I was surprised by an unwelcome guest.

It was a long chicken snake.  The official name is Rat Snake. They aren't really dangerous, but they get so cotton-pickin' big, they scare you.  I have a buddy who will not kill them. He says they are "heat-seeking missiles" that destroy rats in his barn.  That may be the case in his barn, but in mine, the chicken snakes are lazy. Rather than seeking out and destroying rats, they would much rather destroy our eggs, since eggs don't move!

Because of their penchant for egg-eating, our rat snakes must go.  We had seen a reduction in our egg production and now I know why!  Doggone snakes! Fortunately I had a stick that I was able to beat the snake with until he was dead.  I killed him and threw him outside the door of the feed room on the barn floor.  The old boy was caught red-handed. Can you see TWO EGGS in his belly?  See the bulges right by my foot?

Remember back in high school biology class when you had to dissect worms or fetal pigs? Let's dissect this snake and retrieve the eggs!  I went back into the feed room to get a knife to perform the surgery with and wouldn't you know it, I got into a skirmish with a second snake!  This one put up quite a fight, striking at me, but he finally got the business-end of my stick and was incapacitated.  This one didn't have any "egg-bulges" in him, but he would have if he had gotten the opportunity.

The rat snakes laid side by side are roughly the same size.  Perhaps they were a husband and wife pair.  I'll keep a sharp eye out for their offspring!

It is clear that there are two chicken eggs in the snake's stomach.  What they will do is crawl through a small space, rubbing their side and burst the eggs inside them so that they can digest the contents of the egg.  I tried stomping on the bulges, but the eggs would not burst.  I think I know what is going on here!

To prove my suspicion, we must make an incision in the snake's belly to retrieve the stolen eggs.

Once the snake's belly has been cut in half, I use my foot to squeeze the egg out, revealing an egg that proves my suspicion - A Fake Egg!  It is not real, but ceramic. See the black line around the egg?  That is how I mark the nest eggs so we don't pick them up when gathering eggs.

I squeezed out the second egg and it was another fake egg.  This one is made of wood and is another nest egg.  What are nest eggs?  Well, for us they serve two purposes: We put them in the nesting boxes to encourage the hens to lay.  If they see an "egg" in the box, they'll lay their eggs with the nest egg and not out on the ground or in weird, hard-to-find places.  The second reason is to kill snakes.  If a snake eats the nest eggs, like this one did, he will have a case of constipation that no amount of Raisin Bran can cure and will die. When he finally dies and decomposes, we'll find his carcass and retrieve our fake eggs - only this time, we didn't have to wait for that to happen.  We got our eggs back fast!

With the egg thieves executed, the chickens joined me in dancing around the perpetrators, happy that justice had been served.

My wife was also happy that Sonnier's Shed of Snakes is now snake-less. Hopefully...