Rat snakes are great little mousers! That said, they would kill and eat chicks, and they will go after eggs if possible. We have a resident rat snake in the barn, and he/she (never got the opportunity to ask) hasn't hurt anything but the mice. Hens are too large to be prey for them, and anyway, they seem to prefer rats and mice, bless their hearts!

It makes my heart glad, too, Mary. Though I confess, even as much as I love them, there is always that first split second, when something in me shivers slightly. I feel like Emily Dickinson in her lovely poem about snakes: "A narrow fellow in the grass Occasionally rides; You may have met him,--did you not, His notice sudden is. The grass divides as with a comb, A spotted shaft is seen; And then it closes at your feet And opens further on. He likes a boggy acre, A floor too cool for corn. Yet when a child, and barefoot, I more than once, at morn, Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash Unbraiding in the sun,-- When, stooping to secure it, It wrinkled, and was gone. Several of nature's people I know, and they know me; I feel for them a transport Of cordiality; But never met this fellow, Attended or alone, Without a tighter breathing, And zero at the bone." It's that "zero at the bone" I feel for a moment when I spy one slipping through the grass. A great description. Marcia

Lol, I've never had a black racer not do what it's name implies...race away. For me, it's the cottonmouths that absolutely hate me...they inevitably head right for me....I don't stand there to see what their intention is..when they reach me. By contrast, while aggressive when pestered, this snake laid perfectly still hoping that we wouldn't see him....till he was sure he had been detected, then coiled, and struck (repeatedly). He spent some time up with coils in air too...oddly. All in all, he put on as much show as a hognose snake (lol).

Last fall we found a fully grown rat snake in our chicken house (pic 1) You can see how big it is in the second pic after I grabbed it to evict it. It had come in through a couple of holes in the chicken yard fence that have since been closed. I didn't want it in there because I was afraid it might kill one of the hens if they got curious with it. Being constrictors it could easily do it even though my hens are too large to swallow. it now uses a large hole in one my live oaks for home and gives fits to the wild birds if they spy it going up or down that tree!.