Send up the alarm!

It was hot today so after I finished cleaning the Little Bayou House, I grabbed a glass of herbal iced tea and headed out to my favorite chair.  A cool breeze blew off the Bay and made the afternoon delightful..until the mosquitoes paid me a visit and that ended the nicety of the afternoon.  Just as I was heading back indoors, a pair of chickadees started fussing up a storm!  Hmmm?  It is not like these sweet, little birds to be so noisy!  I pondered what had them so upset.  Before I could even head down the hill to where the birds were, many more birds of all types joined the chickadees.  Wrens and titmice were on the lower limbs of a live oak tree while blue jays and woodpeckers were yelling from the pine tree top!  This cacophony kept up with more birds joining with every yell. My first thought was that the Cooper's Hawk or Great Horned Owl had flown in to the treetops to watch the bird feeders.  They both do this often in hopes of finding a fat dove for supper.  This time, however, the smaller birds were all gathered low to the ground...hmm...snake!  I figured that a snake had come up out of the marsh and was making a nuisance of itself.  I had better walk with care if I did not want to find this one the hard way!  No use stepping on a  moccasin!

I was right.  There was a snake near the base of the oak tree.  A Gray Rat Snake was trying to make its way up the tree to raid the nest of the mockingbird.  How this thing knew that the baby birds hatched this past weekend is beyond me but there it was trying to scale the tree trunk.  Each time the near five foot long snake would get a few feet up the tree, the blue jays and mockingbirds would form an attack!  They would swoop at the snake literally knocking it from the tree.  The snake was determined, though, and was not easily daunted by the sharp beaks and talons of the birds.  Ms. Ez and I watched for a few minutes before intervening.  Well, I intervened..that goofy dog had yet to see the snake!  Grabbing the snake by the tail, I flipped it out in the yard!  This confused the snake as I suppose it had never been airborne before!  This bit of lapse in its judgement gave me an opportunity to find a short stick.  Now that the snake was a tad bit "upset" (to say the least!), I was not going to take any chances of getting even a tiny nip.  Even though Gray Rat Snakes are non-venomous, a bite would still smart.  A gentle prodding from my stick sent the snake down the hill and into the marsh.

Mama Mockingbird went back to her nest and all was right with the world.  The chickadees were famished by their battle with the "monster" and held a celebratory feast at the feeders.  The snake would have to settle for some rodent found deep in the marsh and Ms. Ez, the dog, was still oblivious that anything at all had happened.  She sat holding her ball begging to play.