Please Don't Kill Me

Friend says there are snakes in her yard and she has her brother out killing them because they're worried about snakes biting their dogs. I asked, do you have woodpiles or stone bluffs nearby? She said yes. I said, snakes are just waking up after the winter's nap and simply passing through your yard. Please don't kill them. Now awake and slithering through is one of my blacksnakes -- the house snake here, just as a restaurant has a house wine. Harmless. It stood still and posed, head raised, while I took its ceremonial first-day-awake photo. Go eat those mice, bro' you're looking a little thin.

People hate snakes because they slither and they bite. But that's what snakes do. They have no alternative! Leave them alone, don't poke them or grab them, don't let your dogs play with 'em. "Don't let my dogs? But my dogs aren't under my control all the time." Excuse me, but they should be, in country as well as city. I'll bash your free-running dog that's running at me before I'll bash a snake.

Who Lives Here? What'd She Eat? Did It Taste Real Good?

As I stepped off the stone steps into my yard to fill the birdbath, I saw this tableau and it told a mystery story. Something had dug a three-inch-wide hole (measured it) beneath the bottom step. It wasn't there yesterday. Whoever this hole-dweller was, he or she was not in sight. But he or she got hold of an egg -- just one, and plain white without identifying markings (I scrubbed the mud off a piece of shell, using an old toothbrush, just to check) -- and had opened and eaten it. Or, less likely, maybe something had hatched here. Eggshell reassembled provided no more clues.

The prime suspect is the large blacksnake who winters beneath my kitchen floor and eats mice. Saw her earlier this spring, sidewinding toward the house then disappearing beneath it, smooth as liquid, right by the kitchen door. Turned up one of her silver babies when digging nearby in order to plant annuals. I know my blacksnake savors eggs. Once I followed a mess of turkey-egg shells to a nest my blacksnake had cleaned out entirely. She was still there and let me take her picture. But if this time it was my snake or any other (because, three years ago, I saw a milk snake curled around the flagstones right here) how did it carry the egg from the nest to its door? In its mouth? Why didn't it dine where the egg was found?

For sure: It must've tasted real good.