So what do you do? You drop back and punt.

How to make a nude-sunbathing porch now a re-purposed chicken coop into a safe, raccoon-free, opossum-free chicken sanctuary? We had the answer and it was just a matter of some adjunct wiring from the horse’s electric pasture fencing. We have a whopper of a fence charger. Really packs a punch………don’t I know (I get regular, unscheduled chiropractic adjustments from it). So with a little addition of some insulators and some extra 14-gauge wiring we had the makings of the infamous———–(are you ready for it?)———–“Stalag Coop”.

This beauty is wired at the top AND at the bottom. Short predators get zapped on the nose at the bottom and leggy ones that try stepping over that trip wire and scaling the wall for their forbidden dinner get zingoed at the top. HA!!!!!!!!! Take that you fuzzy carnivores! The first night was bliss. I’m sleeping right next to the window that has the cord for the chicken coop’s trap door and all I hear is this “hummmmph” and a hearty thump. In my mind I could see the sneaky raccoon making it to the top and putting its opposing-thumbed, tiny little diminutive hand onto the wire to steady it’s cuteness so that it could grab it’s poultry prize and BAZINGA! The masked-bandit flies backwards having its wind knocked out of its tiny little lungs and hits the ground with a thud! HA! I slept like a baby after that!

So “Stalag Coop” was born. I sleep better at night. But it doesn’t keep out rat snakes. Apparently even though they are called Rat Snakes you think that would describe their diet, but nooooooo. They seem to prefer chicks and eggs to rat snacks. I HATE reaching under a setting hen and instead of grabbing a warm egg I grab a cool, smooth writhing snake! Ooooohhhh I just hate that. It’s a horrible feeling, and WHY does the hen continue setting on top of a snake? Why? Why? Why? Are their little tiny heads vacant too? Another good one is going out into the coop and seeing an ever so long snake coming over the wall for a snack and knowing that you are the one where the buck stops. You have to grab it, dispatch it into a five-gallon bucket (with a very secure lid) and drop it off down the road or far, far away at another farm (I’ll never tell which farms though——maybe, just maybe I’m that petty and I don’t like them——-the farm owners not the snakes——-they can’t help being snakes———they just need to be snakes somewhere else.)

I have relocated huge rat snakes that literally look like a string of pearls on a necklace (they had so many of our eggs in them!). Here’s a fun little memory from a couple decades ago prior to the electrifying of our chicken coop. After dark one night I heard a kerfuffle in the coop. I hadn’t pulled up the trap door yet. So I ran down the hallway in the house, grabbed the 12-gauge, turned on the light and went into the coop. There was a startled opossum, dropping his chicken and heading for the coop door. I pepper his bee-hind on the way out……….what a mistake! Twelve gauge shotgun report in a confined, walled-in area……..I could feel the wave-action (both high tide & low tide) in my ear drums for hours later. Forget hearing. That didn’t come back for hours maybe even days. My eardrums felt like old frayed trampolines. And my generation says they are deaf from being at all the good old rock concerts. That reminds me, I was asked to go to Woodstock, I really was. I didn’t go, I went horseback riding that weekend instead.