Black Rat Snake

On the left side of this photo you can see a portion of the cleared fence row.
My oldest daughter is in the foreground.
My hardworking son is in the corner behind the brush pile on the left.
You can see his orange hat.

Recently my oldest boy has been on a clearing mission. After cutting down the brush from the copse of trees in the corner of the upper hay field, he attacked the Autumn Olives, Russian Olives, multi-flora roses, and other sundry creeping things along the fence row in the back corner of our property closest to our house. This resulted in several large piles of thorny brush about 6 feet high! We finally got these burned down this past weekend. (Below is one of them once it really got going and had burned down some.)

In the course of his destruction, my son disturbed a large, black rat snake. For as long as we have lived here, we have stumbled upon small snakes and large snake skins. We've found skins in the loft of the hay barn, next to the house, and in the woods. Once, as we were driving home, we saw a large Black Rat Snake coiled in the bushes along the wooded fence row that lines the drive. In this same fence row, although quite far away, he stumbled upon what is probably the same snake. It quickly slithered up a tree.  

If you look closely, you can see that the snake is wrapped around the tree.
Its head is in the Virginia creeper leaves on the left side of the tree.

He was wowed by the sight (of what he estimated to be a 6 foot long snake) and came running to tell me. I was an appreciative audience, but otherwise detained, so I sent him back with my phone to take some pictures.

The snake proceeded to coil around the tree, then climb further up and slip into a knot hole, as my son did his best to document.  Then is slipped back out again. 

As these photos show, rat snakes are able climbers. They can even scale brick walls with ease. And like many snakes, they are capable swimmers as well! When frightened, they often assume a kinked posture and remain motionless. They will supposedly vibrate their tail and expel a smelly musk too. Clearly this snake was not in the least bit intimidated by my son!

Black rat snakes primarily eat mice, rats, squirrels, and amphibians. They are constrictors. The local lore is that if you have a black rat snake near your home, it's means you're less likely to encounter a venomous snake, since they avoid each other's territory. I'm not quite sure if I believe that, but I have no problem being neighbors with a creature who is not only harmless to me and my children, but who helps to keep the rodent population in check.

However, rat snakes eat birds AND bird eggs. In fact, these snakes are a common predator of wood duck eggs. So I guess I won't bother to erect any wood duck houses by the lake, as I had considered. I am NOT fond of the fact that they mess with birds. I like birds. 

Persistent Predators

I obtained permission from our parish priest to haul away some aluminum awning frames that were no longer in use and were cluttering up the church yard. My plan is to make a portable chicken run. So far I have bolted the two together to make one long run and have contemplated my options.

These are the 2 awning frames, bolted together.

The day after I unloaded it from our pick-up I came downstairs after tucking our little ones in to find my husband staring at the fox. It was standing at 8:15, long before the sun had set, right next to the awning frames and staring at the chickens in their hoop house. He was just watching in fascination and disbelief, but I threw down the dirty diaper I was holding and ran out in my house shoes shouting and waving my arms. It looked at me approaching for a good few seconds before turning tail.

Since then I have had an animal trying to get into the hoop house. First the pop door was bent out of place. Then there was fur on the pop door, brownish red fur with longer guard hairs with a touch of black and white and fur on their elevated feeder. I promptly zip tied the pop-door at close intervals so that nothing could squeeze through. Then there were paw prints on the outside walls of the coop and a bent corner of the pop door. Then there was scratching and bare dirt beneath the pop door.

The "hoop house," tall enough to walk into, is on the left.
The top is covered in plastic to keep the rain off.
The door is still plastic-ed too, since we wrap the structure for the winter,
and I never bothered to unwrap the door.
Did you notice the cobwebs in the woven wire fence?
Did you see the tent caterpillar on top of it?

Perhaps it is a 'coon. We have one around the house all the time. I treed it in the crabapple tree just the other day. I think a fox would dig better than this animal has. Perhaps the fox will come back each night until it digs its way in. But the attached coop is so far proving to be impenetrable with its latches, straps, carabiners, and double-walls. I wonder how long they will last because life just isn't letting me get to the moveable chicken run creation.

Here's a pic. of the treed raccoon.