712 13. COLUBRIDZ 
Young birds also sometimes are eaten. On one occasion a 
half-grown snake of this kind was found in an aviary where 
domestic canaries were breeding. The snake had crawled 
into the cage through the half-inch mesh of the wire netting 
without difficulty. After having dined on the contents of 
a nest, however, the diameter of the snake was so much 
increased that it could not escape and was killed. When I 
opened it I found three nearly fledged young canaries. 
I once saw a Boyle’s Milk Snake kill and eat a Pituophis 
c. catenifer which was only about three inches shorter than 
itself. See plate No. 82 for photographs. 
A female gopher snake which I had in captivity had been 
captured a few days before “in a marsh near Palo Alto,” 
Santa Clara County, California. During the next few days 
this snake lay almost motionless in a small box in my office 
in the California Academy of Sciences. On the afternoon 
of July 13, however, it became very restless and seriously 
injured its snout in attempting to find some hole through 
which it might escape from its prison. The next morning— 
July 14—\+to my surprise, several eggs were in the box, and 
the number was added to at intervals until by noon of the 
next day, 19 eggs had been laid. 
The eggs when first laid are covered with a loose, soft, 
sticky, parchment-like white membrane. This quickly dries 
and hardens, shrinking upon the substance of the egg until 
quite tense and cementing each egg to the others upon which 
it is laid. After the membranous shell has become dry it 
ceases to shrink, and if the substance of the egg be reduced, 
as by evaporation, wrinkles appear upon its surface. How- 
ever, the softness of the shell and its power to shrink upon 
its contents are restored by the application of water. 
The eggs as laid formed a great cluster surrounded by 
the coiled body of the snake. The latter hissed fiercely 
