Snakes alive...

Bianca's birthday was on Tuesday, so we had our customary little celebration (and I did breakfast-in-bed plus all the housework). This explains perhaps the subsequent disaster.

[Some two weeks earlier, our house python had snuck into the well-guarded chicken 'nursery' one night and plucked one of the five new young Barnevelders. In the morning, we found the python, with a corresponding bulge, in the yard but outside the fine-meshed 'nursery'. Surely she couldn't have got into that well-protected enclosure? Perhaps her little victim had dallied outside in the general run, and we'd missed seeing her when we secured stepmother Phebe and the little ones?

[I picked her up with a three-pronged long-handled cultivator (the bulge made it easier for me by making it more difficult for the big snake to wriggle free from between the tines), and took the pet culprit to our little dam, where she was dumped amid shrieks from the local wren population...

[We inspected the protected enclosure, and fortified it in several places but considered it generally snake-proof. A few nights later a second chicklet was plucked from beneath her stepmother at night, and the survivors stood around as if shell-shocked in the morning. Phebe refused to go back into her 'secure' abode at night with the chicks, so we reluctantly shifted the little family of four into the main chookhouse, were they would be even safer - if somewhat reproached by the resident 12 hens and their rooster. Each morning the little ones would be standing near the door, eagerly waiting to storm out. Most boisterous, as usual, was Fratzel, my personal favourite and Bianca's absolute sook, who allowed her, in fact invited her, to pick her up and have a cuddle. Which was as well, because all they got from her stepmother were nasty pecks on the back...

[Some nights passed uneventfully. But...]

Where's Fratzel?

On the morning after Bianca's birthday I let my partner sleep in while I went outside to do the chicken run: deliver grain containers, release a rooster from separate confinement, and open the main chookhouse to let the rush of feathers blow past me. But hey, only two tiny hens were among the crowd. Who was missing? I thought it might be Uschi, and called out to Bianca.

She rushed from our bed in the loft ran to the chookhouse and yelled: "Fratzel!". Where was Fratzel?

We found out soon enough: in the corner of the chookhouse, almost hidden from view by stacks of concrete blocks that held up the laying nests, was my pet python, bulging contentedly. It seems neither of us had inspected the chookhouse properly the night before at closing time, insouciant bubbly tipplers that we were!

I considered, for a fleeting moment, to slice open that carpet snake and rescue my Fratzel from within. Instead, I latched on to the python's body with the tined implement at the spot where it bulged, and dangled the snake into an empty feed bag. This time I moved her down to an intermittent creek at one edge of our block, well in the bush and at least 350 m from the chookhouse. She could feast on frogs next time... Then I dashed into town on my own, to distract me from thinking about my lovely little companion Fratzel. The survivors went about all day as if dazed. Phebe had 'cut them loose' and sought to attract the attention of one of our four roosters.

So disconsolate were the surviving little pair, Uschi and Bimbo, that we made a little nest for them in the bathroom and kept them there overnight for the next few days, while Bianca and I set about fortifying the chookhouse until it resembled one of the German fortifications I'd seen along the Bretagne coast back in the 'Fifties. I removed the concrete blocks that impeded our vision, drilled holes with a big posthole borer in the dry clay to anchor four solid round treated-pine poles to hold up the ensemble of nest boxes, while Bianca went around and around the henhouse with fine-mesh wire to plug any remotely possible entry spots for the python.

Yesterday, Uschi and Bimbo went back into the chookhouse, much against their wishes (they'd been loitering on the verandah in the past few days, expecting to be picked up and put in the bathroom 'safe house'). Bimbo, tyring frantically to escape from the fateful place where Fratzel had been taken, practically 'walked' up a vertical wire mesh wall for almost 2 metres before she ran out of puff and fell back to the soft ground. I picked her up and placed her on the roosting poles with Uschi, in the shadow of our placid black hen Sabine. Eventually they stopped moaning and whingeing...

I went back several times at night to make sure there was no intruder. After all, as our youngest - herself a mum of one - said pointedly: "You only have two left of five?! You can't even look after your chickens - I wonder how you ever raised four children!!!"

So do we, mate, so do we...