Perils of a Poultry Princess

I like snakes.

I always have.

  Often, in the warm weather, black snakes will hang around in my chicken houses. They lie along the wall, snugged up onto the cool concrete edge of the footing. The chickens give the snake wide berth. I wonder what goes thru a chicken’s mind when that snake slithers through the middle of them. They part like the Red Sea and watch him closely as he slides gracefully thru.

  Sometimes….I touch them or even pick them up. They aren’t poisonous and I know they can bite, but it seems they never want to. I gently pick them up, right behind their beautiful head and look at their eyes.  

  I love the feel of their cool, smooth, dry skin and how strong they are when they coil around my wrist. How their muscles feel, so close under the skin as they slide away from me.

  When Clint is out there with me, I’ll catch one and carry it to where he is. He’ll say “put that down, woman! Leave those snakes alone! They’ll pop you one day!”

  But they never pop me, never even strike at me. They just coil around my arm and hold tight. I am fascinated by them and look for them every summer. I’ll call Clint and say “he was back today! in the same spot!” Clint will ask if I picked it up and I’ll say “of course!” and he says “woman, one of these days you are gonna get POPPED. That snake will get you.” One of the biggest fights we ever had he killed my two black snakes that hung out in House 3. I was at church camp, being a lunch lady for our youth group and I called him to see how things were going and if he was enjoying staying home with the chickens for a change. He said he was and told me about catching 2 large black snakes in the middle of all the baby chicks in house 3. I said “oh, yes, they’ve been in there every day! They must be a male and female, eating mice” Clint said “NO they were eating BABY CHICKS and they had about FIVE each before I got to them and so I KILLED them.”

  I purt near cried. I said “ baby! They couldn’t eat enough baby chicks to hurt anybody. Maybe they get tired of mice. Don’t kill my snakes.”

  “woman! You are so silly about those stupid snakes. They were eating chicks and I killed them and that’s that.” he said.  I still bring that up to him and he says the same thing. “they were eating CHICKS!! So I killed them!! You eat chicks, you die!”

 

  Which brings me to my story of the day. I was walking chickens early one morning and I noticed my usual black snake near the door of House 2. I saw it almost every day and missed it when I didn’t see it. But this time…he seemed to be trapped.

  Each house has 6 mouse bait stations…made out of 3 pieces of 1 ½ in PVC pipe and a T joint. I don’t glue them, just  stick them together so I can put rat poison in them and the chickens can’t get to the poison.

  My snake seemed to have gone in one side of the station, ate a mouse, then tried to go BACK thru and his bulging belly was sticking out one end and his head and tail the other. I pondered on what to do, but thought it best to see if he could get out on his own.

  Every hour or so, I came back and there he was. Still stuck. I knew if he couldn’t let the mouse go thru the process of digestion, the snake would die.

  So after lunch, I unscrewed the bait station from the wall and tried to take it apart with the annoyed snake not understanding what I was doing.

  I got it mostly apart and the snake saw his chance to get away, but he wasn’t completely out of danger and was still caught in part of the pipe.

  So there I stood, pieces of PVC pipe in one hand and a hacked off snake in the other. I could use one hand to pull the pipe apart (the other hand being full of hacked off black snake) but that left the business end to POP me and so what to do? I finally grasped the snake’s head between my bare  knees and pulled the pipes apart and VOILA! the snake was FREE AT LAST. Can I get an amen?  

  He wasn’t as pleased with my help as I had hoped. He seemed to glare at me and I suspected that if I was EVER gonna get POPPED it was now. But he didn’t get me. I followed him for a while, but I could tell he wasn’t having it and I watched him slip into a hole in the wall.

  Soon as the weather warms, he’ll be back. I’ll tell him you said “hello!” I’ll also tell him firmly “if y’all wanna live around here, stick to eating the mice. If you eat baby chicks, Clint will POP you!”