trouble with snakes eating eggs

[Feather Friendly]

Try and see if you can find a local Herpetology Club/Society and get some names and instant contact numbers. Lots of times there will be members who are willing to show up immediately and relocate your snake(s) to prevent them from being harmed by you. Try a local university for an information source or even an internet search. We often have problems with rat snakes sensing out the location of our hen nest boxes and enjoying the buffet. Our solution is to just relocate them to an uninhabited area that is snake habitat friendly. Yes, I have been bitten numerous times by non-venomous snakes and survived them all. It's the surprise of the strike that gets you! Rat snakes for the most part are fairly docile as long as you remain calm. And no, I don't relocate venomous snakes, especially since I was bitten by one a few years ago. Now that was an "Ouch!" for days!

Good Luck!

 

[slatts]

I lost 5 or 6 eggs yesterday to this guy. I believe it's a rat snake. I caught him in the act. He 'was' about 4 feet long.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

.... I caught him in the act. He 'was' about 4 feet long.

RIP Mr. No Shoulders. RIP.

I have never used a Herpetology club before, does it work as well as a garden hoe?

 

[steveyou]

I have 3 hens that pretty much lay an egg a day. For the last 2 months or so, I have been coming up short. I usually will check and find no eggs in the nest. This happened 5 or 6 times. Never 2 days in a row. Usually I check my chickens in the PM, but on ocassion I don't make it, so I will check them the next day. That is what I just did. I just came from checking them and I found a rat snake in the nest. There was just 1 egg left. It apparently has swallowed up to 5 eggs. I proceeded to kill it. I has put out some mothballs, but either they did not help or had deterioated until they were ineffective.

I can tell you one way to snakeproof your pen. Take some of the plastic fine mesh deer fence and line your entire pen. I learned this by accident. I had used this deer fence on the top of my pen. One day, my son and I was standing near the pen talking and we began to smell a bad odor. We tracked it down and found a rat snake on top of the pen caught in the fence. It had got caught in the fence and died. On another ocassion I found 5 rat snakes caught in some more deer fence that was just stretched out about 10 feet on the ground. I am not advocating doing this.

 

[lover of animal]

I have 17 chickens and would hate to loose one of them. But no matter what dont kill the snakes to keep them out of your way!! snakes have to eat too!! chickens are tough. My chickens have eaten big snakes many times, so I would not worry about that. As for the problem in general I believe that there are snake traps so that you can trap the snakes and relocate them. And rember, snakes are living things too that need food and have families.

 

[MelbourneFL]

I've got King Snakes in my area of Melbourne FL... I consider them to be desireable. When King Snakes are around I've never seen a rat (or a rat snake). I've seen them around but never in the coop.

 

[rnyachtclub72]

A guy I work with told me what he does and it seemed like a good idea if you don't mind dealing with the snake in person. He takes a few eggs and uses a needle or a very small drill bit and you make a hole in the egg. Then, take some heavy duty fishing line with some tiny crappie hooks and tie one end of the fishing string to a post or something near where your chickens lay at and tie the other end to the hook and you place the hook inside of the egg. So, I'm sure you will find out soon enough where your eggs are going. I am assuming the shorter the better on the string so your chickens don't get all tangled up.

 

[LuzianaEggn]

As of today i have this problem. Two of my banty eggs i was leaving in the coop to be hatch were gone( most likely eaten). I do t care for snakes and if i find it, it will be destroyed. Yeah i know let it live and all that hippie jive but dude ate my future stock so its clobbering time.

 

[marthas_ear]

Rat snakes come in our coop in broad daylight to steal eggs. They regularly come early evening after hens have laid.
They time it great.
I would like to get rid of them and convince them to move on.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

It seems that your reaction was more sane than this Bell's reaction was.

http://yellowhammernews.com/[email protected]&bt_ts=1468272784518

After you stop laughing check out this: https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/515899/best-way-ive-found-yet-to-deal-with-snake-problems