Our hen house borders the woods on the south side of the property. That's always been a problem. There are lots of critters in the woods - possums, rabbits, rats, MINKS, stray cats, squirrels, and snakes. Rat snakes grow to be six feet long, easily. They look scary, but they are harmless. In fact, we leave them alone for the most part. They are like heat-seeking missiles that take out rats and keep the population under control.
Where we run into problems is when the rat snakes (we call them chicken snakes) opt for easier prey and begin eating our eggs. When I went out to the hen house with my egg basket to begin gathering eggs, look what was waiting for me in the very first box. No wonder all the hens were acting real nervous right outside the hen house.
It's quite obvious the snake had eaten an egg. Its skin is stretched taut and you can see the oval shape of an egg there. It is also an amazing thing that the snake can open its mouth wide enough to ingest the egg.
To assist in combatting egg loss by these reptilian rascals, we have placed ceramic eggs in each of the nesting boxes bordering the woods. I use a black sharpie to draw a stripe around the egg so that I'll be able to tell the fake eggs from the real ones. You can see those below. If you look above, you'll note that the fake egg is missing from the box. The snake had eaten the fake egg. It's a death sentence for the snake. He'll get a terminal case of constipation, because he'll never break that egg and he's sure not gonna pass it.
Sometimes, the snake slithers off into the woods and dies and we'll find the ceramic egg in a snake skeleton months later. This time, I'm not going to wait. I'm going to get our egg back. Armed with a shovel, I performed a surgical procedure to remove it. I got our egg back.
If the snake would have just stayed in his lane, all would have been well. He would have been free to kill rats - a practice that rat snakes are quite adept at doing. Tragically, the snake got "tread" on.
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