Horrific Snake Scene Greets Man Checking on Bird Nest Box

One birdwatcher was shocked and dismayed to find that a family of birds living inside his Delaware bird nesting box had become a greedy snake's lunch.

Going by u/Marty_the_Cat, he uploaded to Reddit a picture of the smug-looking snake sitting inside the bird box, right where the birds should have been nestled.

"Opened the door to my Bluebird nesting box to check on the growth of the baby birds and found this snake inside. All the birds were eaten," u/Marty_the_Cat captioned the post, which amassed over 70,000 upvotes on the website.

Bluebirds are beautifully blue-colored birds found across North America, and come in three species: the mountain bluebird, the western bluebird and the eastern bluebird. Since u/Marty_the_Cat is based in Delaware, these bluebirds may well have been eastern bluebirds, which range between southeastern Canada and the Gulf Coast.

These birds, measuring only around 6 to 8 inches long, usually mate in the spring and summer, with females raising two broods of chicks per season, according to Animal Diversity Web, a website from the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. The female will lay between 3 and 7 eggs, which hatch after around 2 weeks into tiny chicks. These chicks are then fed by the mother for a week or so, leaving the nest as fledglings after 15 to 20 days post-hatching.

Small birds like these, especially the helpless chicks, are unfortunately often easy pickings for hungry predators, including snakes like the one in the picture.

"The snake is a Black Rat Snake, Pantherophis obsoletus," u/Marty_the_Cat told Newsweek via direct message.

Black rat snakes are found across the U.S. eastern states and can grow between 3 and 5 feet long. As their name suggests, they are black in color, with a faint grey background behind their scales.

Unlike many other species of snakes across the U.S., black rat snakes are not venomous but kill their prey via constriction. Their usual fare includes small mammals like rats, mice and voles, as well as frogs, lizards, and songbirds. Birds that nest inside cavities, such as the eastern bluebird and other birds that use bird boxes, are a particular favorite of the black rat snake, with the species having been previously caught red-handed on multiple occasions as it has climbed inside for a quick and easy meal.

"One of the duties of making a bluebird or nesting box is securing the base from predators, and rat snakes will take them out," commented another Reddit user on the post. "There are chimney and/or cone systems that work very well—squirrels, rodents, snakes etc. try to climb the pole and can't really reach around it. otherwise you're pretty much setting the birds up to be eaten instead of finding a better spot for themselves."

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