Snakes!!!

[youtubeminer]

We found a lot of snakes on our yard but the bad thing is our yard is the woods and just in case I need suggestions to keep snake away from our coop.

 

[Primo]

My place is also in the woods. last week i caught a rat snake in the nesting box with two eggs in its stomache and its mouth wrapped around the third. Wrapping everything tight with hardware cloth is about the only thing you can do other than preemptively trapping them (look up using a minnow trap to catch snakes). Pretty sure all the so called solutions using sulphur, moth balls etc are just "snake oil" solutions.

 

[critterkeeper25]

I have posted before about snakes and trying to keep them out of our coop. I found 2 five foot black racer snakes in our coop, picked them up and hauled them about 15 miles away to an uninhabited wooded area and let them go. Last week I caught a third black racer snake (4 ft.) in a nest box. It was in the process of trying to get an egg into its mouth. My hubby has a picture of it on his phone. It was an impossible feat for the snake because it's unhinged jaws just would not open wide enough to allow the process. I had to prod the snake to get it to give up. That snake I also hauled away to an uninhabited wooded area.

The only way I can figure out that the snakes are getting into our coop is through the hen door, which we leave open all day so that the hens can have access to the nest boxes to lay. They don't lay until the afternoon, long after we have let them outside to free range. The snakes were living in the soffits of our coop. We are in the process of nailing carpenters cloth wire over the openings. This way the snakes won't have anywhere to hide to digest.

I know that a lot of people have the first instinct to kill the snakes, but I refuse to do so. We have so many mice and field rats from the neighboring farm fields that are planted with grain, that we need all of the rodent predators that we can get. It is a pain in the butt to have to patrol the coop constantly for snakes, but what else can you do?

I don't think that there is a solution in our case. We can't close up the coop during the day or the hens will lay their eggs who-knows-where. We have an adjacent wooded area that is right behind our coop/run. The hens are in there constantly. We were short about half our egg production before we caught the snakes in the act. I don't think that the snakes would eat 9 eggs at a time. I think that the hens were freaked out by the snake in the nest boxes and went to lay elsewhere, Where, we don't know but we think it's in the woods somewhere. And those woods are now thick with poison ivy which I refuse to enter into! Once we started hauling snakes away, the amount of eggs we were collecting has been increasing. From 15, down to 5 or 6, and now slowly back up to 11-13.