A brave mother fought off a snake from her daughter’s car engine, all in a day’s work.
Nicole Graham and her husband, Mike, are no strangers to snakes as co-owners of The Garden Hen, a Texas-based company that teaches people how to become urban chicken farmers. Part of his job involves cleaning chicken coops, a magnet for snakes that prey on eggs.
With 14 full-time clients and a health condition (in January, Graham was diagnosed with a benign pituitary tumor that caused vision problems), his 18-year-old daughter Haylie has been driving him to the work and from it.
Understandably, a reptile was no big deal.
“I’m not afraid of snakes,” Graham, a mother of three, tells TODAY.com, adding, “Spiders, reptiles, snakes, it doesn’t matter. I look at all animals with respect and compassion.”
On April 4, Graham was cleaning out two chicken coops in Burton when a snake poked its head out of a haystack.
“I said, ‘Well, hi,'” he says.
He immediately recognized it as a rat snake, a non-venomous reptile commonly found in Texas that often preys on chicken eggs.
Graham estimated the snake in question to be over 4 feet long.
Fortunately, Graham was wearing gloves and had a long stick, which he used to push the hay away and then catch the tail.
“Most of the time, you don’t want to go for the head because if they’re startled or startled, they have a tendency to strike,” he says. “The great thing about rat snakes is that they’re usually not aggressive.”
Graham used the cane to prop up the snake’s body and carry it outside where he planned to release it around the wood line.
When Graham was about 10 feet from Haylie’s Mini Cooper, the snake broke free, fell to the ground and quickly slithered into the wheel well.
“It happened so fast,” he recalls. Predicting that the snake would curl up in the hot engine, he opened the hood of his daughter’s car as Haylie filmed from outside.
“Come here,” Graham said to the snake in the video, as he gently pulled it out of the engine. “Baby, I’m not trying to hurt you.”
“Oh my God, oh my God,” exclaims the teenager.
“She’s not used to snakes,” Graham tells TODAY.com of her older daughter. “She’s a girly girl and a free spirit, but there are certain animals she won’t go near.”
Graham released the creature near the woods and went about his day.
The feat exemplified the backyard self-reliance—gardening, raising chickens, life cycle education—that Graham instills in his clients and daughters alike.
“My younger girls don’t know any different,” she says. “We have chickens in the backyard and a garden. There’s a lot to learn.”
You can now add snake fighting to your lesson plan.
