Prayers For A Snake, a black snake in a nestinbox with eggs visible

Prayers for A Snake

Published Friday November 29, 2024 by Lauren Turner

Blogs

A little farm story about a snake, a chicken coop raid, the missing fake eggs, me praying for the snake’s health and well being, and what I found out months later

Transcript

This interesting thing happened yesterday, and I’d like to tell you about it.

I’m sitting out in the hay field on a rare morning where I can watch the sunrise, really enjoying this quiet, peaceful moment. In part, I’m enjoying it with great gratitude and I want to tell you a story. I’m focusing right now on farm here, farmhouse over there, a little tiny building next to it plays into this story. That’s our chicken coop.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me tell you this story that last spring, when the birds were building nests, I was busy planting spring vegetables. Noticed we had a very active snake, probably living under our deck. Now I know some people absolutely love snakes, and even some, let’s say not very thoughtful country, people will kill a snake that crosses their path. This big boy, calling it a boy but I have no idea, of course, that lived under our deck was performing kind of a well needed task for me, and that was, he was keeping the mice population under the deck down.

That house there wasn’t built well, and let’s say the foundation around the whole thing can be easily breached by small critters here and there, insects or mice. Despite all I can do from the inside, I know I can’t take care of the problem from the outside completely. I asked if it was possible for a backhoe to go around that entire house over there to fortify, but it is cost prohibitive, laughable, actually. So we deal the best we can anyway, so that snake was under the house, and I knew it, of course, because I saw it come out occasionally, or was told by others of sightings, usually in a breathless way, “Oh, I don’t like snakes,” but I would always say, well, as long as he leaves my chickens and barn swallows, and barn swallow babies alone. I’m okay with it being under there having mice as his food source.

So one day, I have a photo of it, so I’ll put it in this video. When I put it together, I ran across our friend, crawling up the wall, actually, this is the video, isn’t it? Yes, crawling up the wall towards the swallow was nest where there were babies already hatched. Actually, he, he was all the way up by it, by the by the nest, and he had, he actually had a baby in his mouth, head first, the tail end of the baby, and feet sticking out of his mouth, still as he was beginning to swallow this baby alive. And I grabbed a tool, a very handy tool.

My husband surprised me one day with this tool, a snake grabber. Here, I’ll show you a photo or video clip, and I’ll show you how it works. It’s a great thing. I ran and grabbed a snake grabber. I was barefoot. I was inside and barefoot when I realized what was happening. So that sets the scene and I ran and grabbed that snake grabber. I grabbed that snake, not far, terribly far, behind its head. I didn’t want to hurt the snake, but I sure wanted to stop him from what he was doing, and sure enough, he spit that bird out, that baby bird out. Not long after I grabbed it, it was barely just coming off the wall. He spit that baby bird out and hit the deck of course. Now at this moment, I have this snake and the most unfortunate thing about the whole scene at this point is I was barefoot because and I was trying to ask for help, but I didn’t get far between those two buildings over there along this long tree line, actually, but not too far away from from the Building along that tree line up by the house. I couldn’t walk any further to let the snake go because I had bare feet, and there’s was no walking on the rough ground or the rough grass with my bare feet much farther than that tree line away from the house, and I just let him go there.

Interestingly enough, when I got back to the house, my husband had already retrieved the baby, and it was still alive, so he was standing there with this baby. He said, it’s still alive. I think it’s unhurt. And he handed me the baby, and I was like, “Oh my gosh.”

So even though it was practically swallowed whole, it was only half swallowed by the snake, it had fallen, you know, about nine feet, fell nine feet and hit the deck, but it appeared to be okay, and appeared to be just fine, as matter of fact. So my husband handed me the baby bird, and I put him back in in the nest, and that was that day. Now what I want to talk about is what happened next.

I’m gonna zoom in again and point out that that little building right there with a light on it, that’s our chicken coop, and I’ve been having less eggs occasionally. I also had a had a chicken, still have her, I guess a real quote, ‘country person’ would throw it in a pot and call it dinner. But I just have now sequestered this chicken away from the others where she can still see them. She can still come, you know, contact them through, uh, through some hard work-cloth and kind of pretend to be near them, just can’t touch feathers.

She pecks eggs, including her own. She pecks eggs, destroying them, but there were also eggs missing today. I have a photo of that too. I opened up the nest box and yep, this is what I found. Mr. Snake was back. Damn.

I ran inside, I grabbed my dad’s caregiver, and I went, “Hey, is dad settled for a moment. Is he going to be okay? I need you to help me do something.”

She said, “Yeah, what’s happening now?”

This particular caregiver, Annie, was one who didn’t like snakes, like the worst, like, I can’t be anywhere near snakes. I’m like, You’re gonna do this thing for me. And she said, What? And I said, I just need you to drive. Drive the four wheeler here with me. I got a little errand to run, I won’t be able to drive. I need your hands.

So I got the four wheeler over running, and I said, “You just stay there. I’m gonna go get something.”

I had my snake grabber tool. I warned her, of course, but actually gave her my phone, and I have a little video, and I’m gonna share that right here. I went and opened up that nest box, and I grabbed that snake, and I’m guessing it’s the same snake boy again, and came out the backyard and sat on the edge of the wheeler wall, Annie drove all the way down this tree line. Oh, there’s the beautiful sense sunrise. Oh, look what the camera did. Take a moment. We’ll enjoy that in a sec and it went, and I went all the way past, past this tree line, all the way across our creek.

Let’s watch the sunrise while I finish this story, and I take off my glasses and watch the sunrise and get the sunrise in my eyes as I’m telling the end of this beautiful story. So we drove all the way past the creek. There wasn’t much water in the creek, but, you know, got all the way pretty far from the house before we’re dropping the snake off woods. Now, it was fairly entertaining driving, coming to the creek from the farm. Annie was a little perturbed, shall we say, as well as the snake, I had him not far behind his head.

Again, I’m trying not to hurt him. I just, like to start from the story, pay attention to the sun rising, just for a little while. Sun gazing can be an amazing addition of energy to your life, if done safely and with thought. I’ll finish My story here shortly.

Okay, back to this next story. So I opened up the nest boxes and realize that that snake ate those eggs. I went into the coop, searched around, sure enough, all four of the fake eggs that were distributed amongst the next next boxes were gone, and I was absolutely mortified for a variety of reasons. The first one was I didn’t want to hurt that snake. And I knew a snake, I know a snake can regurgitate an egg, but that snake ate 1234, and, yeah, I thought it might be a death sentence for the snake. I didn’t want to hurt him, and I had taken him across the creek and and I actually thought this was the second part where I was feeling remorseful. I thought, you know, if I didn’t really realize, I mean, I guess I should have he was possibly extra lumpy, but with the excitement of the scene, I didn’t realize that he had swallowed those eggs till later.

I never thought a snake would swallow fake eggs. They smell. They smell so keenly. They have such keen senses of smell. But of course, these eggs smelled like chickens, right? Chickens have been laying on them for a very long time, so maybe it was full later I heard people actually put golf balls and chicken nests, both to do the fake egg things for the chicken benefit, but also to kill the snakes. And I thought, that’s terrible. I mean, I never would do that. Would never intentionally harm snake like that, maybe not even a rattle snake, I don’t know, ask me later, prairie rattler being right up by the barn, I might add.

I might change my opinion on that near my grandchildren, but these beneficial, beautiful snakes I would never, so the story ended, so that was, you know, months ago, being in the fall.

Well, this thing happened.

My husband was mowing. He sent me a photograph. He didn’t get off the mower, but he sent me a photograph. And I’m looking down at that photo, and I’m like, “Okay, what am I looking at?”

And he didn’t get very close. I mean, they seem like eggs here, of course. I mean, they could have been some fungus or mushrooms that those looked like eggs. And I’m like, what kind of eggs look like? Chicken eggs out in the woods. Except for you got it, those fake eggs. Yeah, I had felt so guilty about that saying, probably just, or could have just spent his last days moving around the woods. Is possibly trying to expel those eggs and be unable to maybe and then simply dying, you know, slow and probably pretty miserable death.

But I felt guilty, and so I had been praying for the snake, either that he returned to health by expelling those eggs or by not suffering too long. So when Tom shared that photo with me, I couldn’t wait go to that exact location and see what I was going to find. And sure enough, sure enough, still right here, still right here. Now, of course, I actually thought, well, could the snake have died and then the eggs are just there after, after the body decomposed, but there was no evidence of that. And so I think the snake, Mr. Black Snake, guessing four and a half to five feet, tell me a little video clip or that rolled up, rolled up. Boy in the nest box, maybe four. Big Boy, though, I guess he’s okay. I don’t know if he could make it all the way back from these woods, back to the house, but the the egg pecker has. I’m not taking my eggs and swallows have left for the season, so maybe I’ll come back.

Thank you for listening to my story. Did you think it was silly that I prayed for a snake? Were you one of the people who saw the thumbnail of this video and said snake? I try really, really hard not to hate anything, not even the ticks or the flies, mosquitoes. That’s a challenge. I don’t hate snakes.

What a beautiful morning. One of the things I did was I left all the animals. I said, You know what creatures, creators, I’m going to go enjoy this day. This morning not a cloud in the sky, not really. There’s a contrail. I know there are other things that can be in the sky, but these actually are contrails.

Boy, that’s a whole ‘nother video, but I will tell you that you can kind of tell kinds of things in the sky can’t stand up show you our drought conditions. The good news is we do have a little water in that pond, but not enough. These are more of these hedge trees. They’re also called osage orange. See those big green walls? Deer eat those. Some horses love them. All of mine do. My donkey didn’t touch them, though. I don’t think osage, orange osage, like the Native American tribe. All right, I’m gonna go back to the farmhouse. Take care of everybody. Sending you prayers and blessings on this beautiful day.

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