Saturday afternoon one of Kindra’s chickens was trying to catch something in the corner of the coop.
The chicken would peck five or six times in a row, as if its target was quicker than your typical cricket or worm.
Finally, she beaked it and held it up to shake and I could see that she had - a tiny snake. Three inches long.
I couldn’t tell what kind it was, but it was a snake and it was none too happy that its short life was about to end in the craw of an Easter Egger pullet.
I saluted the chicken, which Kindra has named Chickolas Cage, for up-ending the long relationship between chickens and snakes.
This is at least two times in the last few years that a chicken has eaten a snake on our place. The other was a Delaware hen who killed and ate a pygmy rattlesnake.
So, we may be witnessing an evolutionary trend that will place chickens ahead of snakes on the food chain.
We’ve had a lot of chickens and snakes on our place, although not so many the last four years.
I raised hundreds of chickens and turkeys, but swore off because of all the predators that saw them as buffet items.
Coyotes, foxes, coons, possums, hawks, wandering dogs. They all tried to eat the poultry before I could.
It was expensive, and the fubrearers would incite Monroe and Martin, so I would be awakened every couple of hours by barking.
There were a lot of pygmy rattlers at one time, too, which is how the Delaware hen came to have one for lunch, but a king snake named Rex showed up one year and ate them all.
I appreciated that and have welcomed him back every time his circuit would bring him by the house.
So, for the last five years we have had a poultry-free and snake-free lifestyle and I was happy to keep it that way.
But a couple of months ago, the ag department at our school got an incubator and needed hatching eggs as a project.
Kindra and I decided to provide them, and further decided that we would keep the chicks that hatched. This was when eggs were $450 a dozen, so it seemed like a good idea.
I ordered some Easter Egger eggs from a hatchery. You might not be familiar with Easter Eggers if you aren’t a chicken fancier. They lay eggs ranging from bright blue shells to olive to greenish, with all degrees in between.
Of 11 eggs, three hatched and two chicks survived, so we suppplemented them with six other chicks acquired from yonder feed store.
In addition to Chickolas Cage, Kindra has named one Cluck Norris and one Egger Allan Poe. There is also Meryl Cheep.
That is how they came to be in a hand-built coop and how Chikolas Cage came to encounter the tiny snake.
Add up the cost of the eggs and the extra chicks, the food and the cost of materials for the coop and we’re into the chicken business for probably $300 with the first egg still months away.
But hey. That price includes complimentary snake control, and it’s hard to put a value on that.