CHAPTER III.
OPHIDIAN TASTE FOR BIRDS’ EGGS.
CAN we correctly say that snakes have a ‘taste’ for eggs? What flavour can there be in an egg-shell, and what pleasure or gratification can a snake derive from swallowing a hard, round, tasteless, apparently odourless, and inconvenient mass like a large egg?
That snakes do devour eggs and swallow them whole, though the fact is often questioned in zoological journals, is well known in countries where snakes abound. Therefore, we are led to consider by what extraordinary insight or perception a snake discovers that this uncompromising solid contains suitable food? Avoiding, as snakes do as a rule, all dead or even motionless food, it is the more surprising that eggs should prove an exception. And not merely the small and soft-shelled eggs of little birds, that can be got easily into the mouth and swallowed, but the eggs of poultry and the larger birds, which must in the first place be difficult to grasp, and in the second place to which the jaws so wonderfully adjust themselves that the egg passes down entire into the stomach.
Many snakes which do not habitually live in trees, will climb them in search of birds’ eggs; and many others, not so agile in climbing, consume vast numbers of eggs from the nests of birds which build upon the ground. In countries where snakes are numerous and population sparse, their depredations in the poultry-yards of secluded residences are of common occurrence. And it is a noteworthy fact that the crawling culprits possess an excellent memory for the localities of hens’ nests, so that when once the eggs have been missing, and the snake’s tracks discovered, the farm-hands well know that the offence will be repeated, and watch for the thief, to whom no mercy is shown. But between their virtues as mousers and their vices as egg-thieves, an American farmer does sometimes hesitate in destroying certain non-venomous snakes, and may occasionally feel disposed to save his crops, to the sacrifice of his wife’s poultry-yard.
A gentleman, long a resident in India, informed me that a cobra once got through a chink into his hen-house, and ate so many eggs from under a sitting hen, that it could not effect its exit through the same chink, and so remained half in and half out, where the next morning it was discovered in a very surfeited condition. It was immediately killed and cut open, when, as the eggs were found to be unbroken and still warm, the experiment was tried of replacing them under the mother, who in due time hatched the brood none the worse for this singular ‘departure’ in their process of incubation.
In another poultry-yard a cobra was found coiled in a hen’s nest, from which all the eggs were gone but two. In this case, also, the snake had swallowed more than it could conveniently manage, but either alarm, capture, or greediness so impaired its digestion that all the eggs were ejected entire!