Snake

Good morning!

By Moristotle

Ooh, I thought, something bit me! It was barely light when I had reached my right hand around to the back of the bird feeder to open it and dump some sunflower hearts in. I pulled the hand back quickly, as quickly thinking something had bitten me.
    I walked around to the back of the feeder, but it was too dark to see anything. I decided to wait until light to come back and try to open the top for re-supplying the sunflower hearts.
    Returning to the house, I wondered what it could have been. Had my hand – at the base of the little finger – simply impinged on a sharp edge of the feeder? A bird? Surely not, they hadn’t had teeth (had they?) since they were dinosaurs. A lizard?
    I thought of Wally, our poodle in Chapel Hill, who moved to Mebane with us in 2008; Wally had suffered a Copperhead bite between two toes of his right hind foot and come yelping to us with a lot more emotion than I was feeling now. Somehow I knew that the “bite,” however electric it had seemed for a millisecond – had the biter struck a nerve in my hand? – had been more like a kiss than a stab. Or, anyway, it felt that way. I later described the encounter to a friend as “wonderful.”
    In the well-lit kitchen, I could see two close tooth marks a half-inch up my little finger and another – or a cut or tear – in the flesh between little finger and ring finger. I rinsed the blood off and dried my hand with a paper towel. No more bleeding – superficial wound.

An hour later I made sure that no creature was nesting on the back of the feeder before I – carefully nevertheless – opened the top. For some reason, it only occurred to me after I poured in some hearts to get out my iPhone and hold the lens just above the edge to take a picture:

    I looked at the photo and realized that maybe those bird feathers I had seen in the front of the feeder were the remains of a bird the Black Rat Snake had eaten? Do Black Rat Snakes eat birds? Hmmm.
    Later I consulted Wikipedia and read, “The diet includes rodents, lizards, frogs, and birds and their eggs.” And, of course, they are called “rat snakes.” And then I remembered the huge Black Snake in Chapel Hill that had tried to reach the eggs in a bird’s nest high in the crape myrtle at our front door....

I came back in a little while to remove the feeder from its mount and carry it into the utility yard, where I laid it down and tilted it back so the snake could – would, I hoped! – get out of there. But all that remained were the sunflower hearts; the snake had already departed, exited through the narrow opening between top and backside and “jumped” down to the ground, or crawled down the plants up which my wife suggested it had presumably come.
    Wonders!

Copyright © 2018 by Moristotle