SNAKE ATTACK AND THE DISAPPEARING QUAIL

Now THAT was an exciting phone call!

This morning Hive account@mama-pepper called me with an important update: quail were gone and a snake was in the cage! Soon, I was racing over to help. Here is the video that I shot.

THE VIDEO

THE PHOTOS

It's not exactly what you want to hear in the morning, since losing some livestock or animals is never fun, but at least we caught it right away. Trust me, this thing had just eaten this quail and may have had an appetite for more. If we would have found it later in the day, it may have eaten two or three of our quail by then.

We watched it "swallow" the quail for a while too. It kinks its neck and uses that to force the quail further into its body. I show some footage of this in the video, but you can see it in the photo above too. Also, if you looks near the "S" in the snakes neck, you can see how loose the skin around it still is.

Thankfully, once a snake swallows something bigger than it's girth, it becomes trapped in the cage. Whether the snake finds some chicken eggs or some quail, once they swallow them, they are trapped. It was sad for us to lose the quail, but it is part of reality and part of the food chain. Down on our land we plan on building a quail coop out of just hardware cloth, which will prevent this from happening.