- Apr 22, 2012
- 52
- 2
- 33
So yesterday, when my daughter went out to get eggs, there was a snake in the nest! AAACK! We live in a pretty rural area with a lot of woods, so I tried to pick it up with the end of a rake to just shoo it out of there but it crawled into the coop instead. The chickens were curious, but kept their distance.
Up above our nesting boxes, we put up some hardware cloth to keep them from sitting up there, because it would be a very difficult area to clean. But the snake slithered up there and hid behind it. AAACK!
It was quite an interesting sight as my 11 year old son and I climbed into the coop and squirted the snake with water guns (my husband, who was not at home at the time, suggested the hose, but I really didn't want the mess of the cleanup after soaking my coop) to get him to move close to the hole. With my garden gloves on, I grabbed the snake and we secured it in a plastic tote and snapped the lid on. Today, we will go somewhere pretty far away and relocate him.
Hopefully, it won't make it's way back. Ironically enough, I have one hen that prefers to lay her eggs in the woods. If we take all her eggs, she finds a new spot, so we have resigned ourselves to just collecting eggs from her "hidden nest", leaving a few so she doesn't think we disturbed it. And the snakes haven't found that nest yet, or anything else for that matter.
Here's our secret egg layer, our Black Sumatra.
A close up of how many eggs were in the nest when we first found it.
And how well she hid it from us in the palmettos! Maybe we would have never found it if she didn't pop out singing the egg song one day!
Up above our nesting boxes, we put up some hardware cloth to keep them from sitting up there, because it would be a very difficult area to clean. But the snake slithered up there and hid behind it. AAACK!
It was quite an interesting sight as my 11 year old son and I climbed into the coop and squirted the snake with water guns (my husband, who was not at home at the time, suggested the hose, but I really didn't want the mess of the cleanup after soaking my coop) to get him to move close to the hole. With my garden gloves on, I grabbed the snake and we secured it in a plastic tote and snapped the lid on. Today, we will go somewhere pretty far away and relocate him.
Hopefully, it won't make it's way back. Ironically enough, I have one hen that prefers to lay her eggs in the woods. If we take all her eggs, she finds a new spot, so we have resigned ourselves to just collecting eggs from her "hidden nest", leaving a few so she doesn't think we disturbed it. And the snakes haven't found that nest yet, or anything else for that matter.
Here's our secret egg layer, our Black Sumatra.
A close up of how many eggs were in the nest when we first found it.
And how well she hid it from us in the palmettos! Maybe we would have never found it if she didn't pop out singing the egg song one day!
