Chelly, I grew up in San Berdoo and Riverside - my ma kept a couple of Horned Toads that got to be about as big as coffee saucers. Had three California King Snakes that we released up in the Cajon Pass.
SuburbanHomesteader, thanx for posting that excellent shot - it just screams half-inch hardware cloth. We put our chooks out when they were big enough to roost and I had put a baby monitor in the coop. If I thought any of our slithery property mates were a threat - I'd have some new hat bands. But the chooks act like beaters on safari, i.e., when I see them circled up and growling it's time to go save a snake. The turkey hens are more like I'd expect Velociraptors to act when they find one, making little predator trills interspersed with `I've found something yummy whoots, necks stretched out, tag teaming the snake.
The one time the chooks ran into a big snake (Eastern Water snake) they just gave it wide berth and the roo led the hens away from the pond.
My favorites here are the Scaley Green Tree snakes (we think of them as being itinerant ornamentals when we find them in the Lavender Hysop), the girls do not get to translate these guys into strands of spaghetti.
James Dickey wrote a couple of lines, in the book Deliverance, about watching a snake cross the bank of a river and then go into the water without pausing or changing its motion "a being with a single spell and no barriers."
Keep those chooks safe!
John
