Today’s adventure continues…

The headless rooster is still lying in a bucket, waiting for the neighbor to collect him and I had just made dough to roll out into tortillas so we can have burritos for lunch. The pile of used dishtowels had grown to just about respectable enough for a full laundry load, so I gathered them up and walked into the bathroom….

…and came face to face (or at least toe to face, for I was in socks) with a snake.

Just a tiny little thing, as you can see. Luckily, this is not India nor Australia nor black mamba territory. It’s just a baby grass snake (more nicely named in German as a Ringelnatter), a danger mainly to goldfish and small amphibians. But, phew, even so, it was a surprise, even if I’m not afraid of snakes at all.

But, forget for the moment how did it get in, how do I get it out of here?

The answer to that question turned out to be with a wooden chopstick and a cotton shopping bag. It took me about 20 seconds to corner the poor little quietly hissing snake and coax it into the bag, which I then carried out to the miserable little excuse for an artificial pond at the back of our backyard. The baby snake was happy to slink off and into the water, in between a couple of stones, where it felt it was safe from me.

I don’t know what it’s going to find to eat, though. Although I do still sometimes find a toad on our lawn and we had literally thousands of baby toads hatch out from tadpoles last year, this year, any egg masses left by toads this year must have gotten eaten by the ducks who spent every night during the first half of spring in our pond. We haven’t had a single tadpole at all.