It was a king snake, most likely, since the markings can be very faint,
especially on larger specimens.
Please don't snap him like a whip. This is probably the single most
beneficial snake you can have around. He might eat an egg now and then,
but he'll eat all sorts of other things that you'll be glad to be rid of.

A herpetologist at the Museum of Nat Sci send me this EXCELLENT url to help
anyone identify any of the 35 species of snakes found in NC.
http://www.bio.davidson.edu/Biology/...rps_of_NC.html

I determined from the pictures and descriptions that it was a late
adolescent black Rat Snake (the behavior was even perfectly described, the
markings matched, and so did the head shape).

Usually I would welcome the OCCASIONAL non-poisonous snake, but I raise rare
poultry and have to sell chicks in spring and summer to cover the costs of
feeding the birds year around. I usually get about 2 or 3 dozen eggs a day
this time of year from the Marans, the Welsummers, the Leghorns, and even
the Rapa Nuis (the egg basket is HEAVY every day this time of year), but
there was not even ONE egg today (except in the Welsummer pen, up the hill
from the others), just part of ONE shell. Yesterday I got two eggs from the
main pen. Out of over 65 hens I am feeding and 20 roosters. That's a LOT
of chicken feed!

I think I have a LOT of big snakes here, more than even before. Is this
revenge by the snakes for letting the chickens eat the baby mice?

I am also missing one of my four baby Rapa Nui bantams, about 8 weeks old.
That REALLY upset me, their daddy is getting old and I wanted all of
Mahogany's babies I could get this year. It was their pen I saw the snake
in, so I believe the snakes have been getting all their eggs, preventing me
from getting any other Mahogany babies, and no telling when the snakes will
eat the other babies. To me, knowing the rarity of this particular type of
bird, the loss is devastating. Most poultry fanciers, if they could have
this kind of bird at all, would kill ANY kind of predator to protect them!

Egg theft and chick eating by huge snakes is not fair to the chickens, and I
still have people on my waiting list for chicks from eggs I haven't gotten
because the snakes got there first. The snakes are going in and eating the
eggs before I get home and can go down to collect them. These people
deserve live babies a LOT more than uninvited giant snakes deserve a free
meal.

This isn't just one snake, and I literally cannot afford the losses I am now
incurring (don't want to return a lot of deposits or disappoint return
customers). The birds are healthy and recently wormed, they ARE laying, but
I am not getting the eggs, the snakes are, they must patrol the nests
several times a day. I can't meet my chick orders with eggs from just the
two days a week when I can go out and collect eggs once an hour!

While I generally believe in "live and let live", when the actions of
intruders threaten my ability to keep and feed my beloved birds, can you
blame me for wanting the snakes gone? When they eat my long-awaited babies
and make me unable to hatch any more, it upsets me very badly.

If I can get someone who knows how to trap snakes to REMOVE them (preferably
relocating them to unoccupied country), then I can use traps and/or bait for
the mice, and get things back to normal.

DESPERATELY, laurie