Unintended Consequences

We have 19 hens and five nest boxes, but all the hens wanted to lay their eggs in the same nest. A waiting line often formed in front of it and sometimes a hen would drop her egg on the floor, unable to wait her turn. I once saw two hens in the nest with a third trying to squeeze in with them. With fourteen eggs in the same nest breakage is inevitable.

I had heard that placing fake eggs in the various nests would encourage the hens to diversify their laying preference. Ceramic eggs are available from MacMurray Hatchery in Iowa. I ordered a dozen.

We placed two ceramic eggs in each of the unfavored nests and soon the hens were using all the nests. The ceramic eggs are so realistic that we were gathering them by mistake, so we used a black marker to make a dot on each fake egg.

Last summer a big black snake often visited the chicken house for a free lunch. One day I noticed a hen sitting quite high in a nest and discovered that she was sitting on top of the coiled, lumpy snake. Dennis found the snake in the hen house several times, each time tossing that old snake over the pasture fence, but he always came back.

Hibernation solved that problem for the winter, but this morning Dennis found the snake in a nest. Having swallowed a ceramic egg, the snake was not feeling well. Dennis, as usual, put the snake in the pasture. Sadly for the snake, swallowing a fake egg has sealed its fate. It won't be able to digest or pass the egg and will die. It seems a cruel death.

Truly, though, I wasn't surprised because I had read a poem by Clyde E. Daniels called "Chicken Snake." Mr. Daniels' family kept a white porcelain doorknob in their chicken house. The poem begins like this:

    I chased that chicken
     Snake from the hen house
     To the plum thicket
     A many a times,
     Where Papa would say,
     "Let 'im go boy.
     He'll swallow the wrong thing
     One of these days."
     And one day he did.


Thanks to the Texas Folklore Society for publishing the poem in Juneteenth Texas, published in 1996. I hope they will give me permission to include the entire poem here.