snakes in the chicken coop

[sdugey]

I used something called

"serpentguard worked for me. serpentguard.com

It is an organic repellent that snakes do not like the smell of. It will not hurt your chickens, cats, dogs, etc. I even sprayed it directly onto the nest.

 

[Frindizzle]

from Washington! I call us a flock, but do not worry, no pecking order here.

I am sorry about your hens

 

[mmmeyer]

serpentguard.com
Great a friend of mine is loosing eggs to snakes

Thanks

I used something called

"serpentguard worked for me. serpentguard.com

It is an organic repellent that snakes do not like the smell of. It will not hurt your chickens, cats, dogs, etc. I even sprayed it directly onto the nest.

 

[beinginspired]

This was yesterday at the coop. Two long (rat snakes?) caught in some netting my husband put up to keep the baby chicks from going through the fence in the outside run. Never had babies before, so we never thought about how small they are! I didn't think about it at the time catching snakes, but it did. These 4 ft long snakes can easily go through regular chicken wire. If we ever replace ours, it will be with hardware wire with smaller openings. In the meantime, this bird netting would be easy to install over chicken wire and fasten on with zip ties (cable ties). It's cheap too. It is the kind that's used to drape over fruit trees to keep birds from pecking the fruit. It's hardly noticeable.

I had some of this netting temporarily over my goldfish pond when the leaves were falling a few years ago. I " caught " a large water snake in that netting, and cut him out, took him down the road a few miles, and set him free away from homes. My husband said he probably beat me back to our house! Ha! I don't know. I just don't like to kill anything. We live next to a wooded area and we will continue to have snake issues, I'm afraid.

I also have another "hint" that I hope might help someone. I went to Hobby Lobby one year after Easter and bought several wooden eggs. They were already painted white and the same size as a regular egg and about the same weight. I placed them in my nests for 2 reasons - the girls I adopted were already grown and laying. I thought it might show them where to lay in their new home, and it also helped me know when a snake had been in the coop. He would swallow the egg from the nest, then travel down to the chicken wire and eventually have to spit it back out to get back out through the wire. When I found an egg at the far end of the run, I would know there had been a snake in there. That doesn't always work, because they can eat many real eggs before they accidentally get the wooden one - but it helps me. I only had 6 hens, so I pretty much knew when some were missing. I also had a large snake swallow a wooden egg too far down, and he couldn't get it back up.

Sorry so long!