My son Jaeson and I were out a couple of mornings ago, doing the daily farm chores. While I checked and reset our live traps, Jaeson went to fill the chicken and duck waterers. Suddenly, I heard a startled “Oh!” Looking up, I saw Jaeson, waterer in hand, standing statue-still and staring at the ground.
“What is it?” I called out.
“There’s a snake here,” he told me.
“Is it a garter snake?” I asked, assuming it was one of the little yard snakes common to our farm.
Jaeson didn’t take his gaze off the ground. “Noooooo … it’s a big fat snake and it’s reared its head up at me and is really mad.”
I immediately stopped what I was doing and dashed across the grass to the run fence and peeked in. Sure enough, a dark snake with a white underbelly was reared up, cobra style, about half a foot off the ground, continually flicking its tongue at Jaeson, who stood perhaps three feet away.
“I didn’t even see it was a snake,” Jaeson told me. “I thought someone had left the garden hose in here.”
I walked down the fence line to come even with the snake and gasped. It was at least another two feet longer, thicker than a garden hose, and its tail was upright and vibrating swiftly back and forth in a blur. Rattler, I thought. The coloration didn’t match our state’s sole rattlesnake, the shy Massasauga, but that tail convinced me Jaeson was in peril.
I had him slowly back away. The snake remained in its defensive posture.
Once he was clear, we discussed our immediate options. With the snake just two feet from the coop’s pop door, we decided against releasing the birds, since we’d have to approach the angry serpent.
We decided to save this coop for the last/ I stood guard and watched the snake while Jaeson dealt with the other henhouses. Just as he returned, the snake took off at incredible speed, heading for the front of the run.
We dashed out of the way and lost total track of where he went, which resulted in us standing still and craning our necks every which way for a few minutes until Jaeson spotted him … under the duck shelter where the feed bowl was.
Of course.
Jaeson let the ducks out, and fortunately they headed straight for their pool. This gave us the opportunity to fill their waterer and put it back in place. Our slithery friend, however, was not moving from the shade of the shelter.
Using a spare fence post, I retrieved the food bowl, which Jaeson filled. “Now what?” he asked. The ducks weren’t particularly smart. They wouldn’t know to look for their food in another part of the run. In addition, we were expecting rain and didn’t want the food to get ruined by the expected precipitation.
I finally made the decision to put the bowl back…