Until the past two summers, in eight years of living where we do now, we've only seen two snakes. But that changed the summer before last. We have free range chickens, which should have brought the snakes in years ago, but it didn't. Then the summer of 2009, we started getting visitors. It started with a corn snake, which I don't think I've ever seen in the wild, even though they are of this area. Then it was your traditional black rat snakes. The corn snake was in the back of our field, so we observed him for a bit and let him go on his way. But the rat snakes were more bold.

They started investigating my husband's shop, which was also a favorite laying spot for one of my chickens. About ten pm one night we heard her raising cain, and found her fighting off a rat snake trying to get her babies. He was caught and removed. We had another that while he ate the hen's eggs, he was constricting the hen at the same time. It took some doing, but my husband got him to let loose of the hen and she lived to see another day, as well as he did.

This summer proved to be most interesting in their activities. We had a total of four rat snakes and a coach whip that were removed from our yard. My mother in law lives next door to us, and called me one afternoon frantic. She'd noticed the chickens were raising cain and when she went to see what all the commotion was about, she found two rat snakes against the back side of her house, trying to preserve the species. Not something she wanted to find. My husband, the snake mumbler as a friend of ours calls him, caught both of them and we relocated them down the road. Love was still in the air, right back at it they went.

One was your regular black rat, who'd obviously had a pretty rough life. The tail was missing and scars over the body. I would venture to say it may have survived a run on the highway. The other was a yellow rat snake, which isn't something we see often in the south central part of SC.

The local snakes must know my mother in law hates them, because out of the five snakes this year, four we caught along the back side of her house. One was in my husband's shop. And each one is carefully caught, and released elsewhere. They can live in the field, but once they start coming to the house, it gets a bit to close for comfort. And my mother in law starts freaking out.

Wonder what he'll catch next year?