White Eggs and a Black Rat Snake

One of our Silver Phoenix pullets has started to lay. I assume that means she's graduated to hen status? I'm guessing it's Caroline who's laying. She's the biggest of the SPs so presumably the most mature - at least in a reproductive way. Her eggs are quite a bit smaller than Winnie's and Coco's (as you can see in the picture). I think they'll eventually get a little bit bigger but probably won't ever be quite as big as Coco's. SPs are a smaller breed and I don't think they're particularly noted as super huge egg layers. The other difference in the eggs is that the SPs lay white-shelled eggs.

In other chicken news . . . It looks like we've got our first predator issue. Thankfully it's not attacking the chickens. No, what we have is an egg stealer. I was giving the ladies food and water yesterday and when I checked for eggs there were none. Odd I thought - the day before we had three. As I was making my way out of the coop I saw the culprit - a 4 to 5 foot long black rat snake hanging out on a ledge above the coop door. I tried to catch him with the fork I use for moving hay around, but he easily slithered out of the fork tines and made his way through the chicken wire covering the lattice under our screened porch and went to hang out in our deck framing. Looks like I'll need to cover that section of chicken wire with something that's got smaller holes. What makes that tough is there's not much to nail or staple the wire to on that side of the coop.

I don't like to kill stuff but I'm starting to suspect this snake in several other incidents we've had around the place. If we can't keep him out of the chicken coop we may have to consider the death penalty. I've seen him (or another black rat snake) climbing up a tree to one of our blue bird boxes in the back yard, I've untangled a black snake from the bird netting around our blueberries, and we lost a clutch of blue bird chicks to something - I can only assume it was the black rat snake. According to the web sites I've checked out these snakes eat not only eggs but also small birds, and one of their nicknames is "Chicken Snake" - that's not a good sign.

One thing I wonder is how the snake knows where to go for the eggs. Our nesting boxes are inside the hen box so you can't just see the eggs. Do eggs have a smell that snakes can detect? Actually I bet that's it. I'd be curious to know if anyone has any more info on that.