Sure, Brent--Although I certainly won't be able to ID whoever laid eggs in your mulch.
Speaking of eggs, I guess I'll go ahead and post my little scout camp tale, since probably only herpers are still reading.
While spending the summer with a friend in Tennessee, I tagged along to Kentucky when his scout troop went up there for camp. Being a California boy and an enthusiastic snake hunter, I was anxious to see what unfamiliar species I might encounter in this new, exotic land. So, when my friend and I happened to spy that iridescent, gleaming black king stretched out in the sunshine next to a fallen tree, I thought I had died and gone to herp heaven. Lacking a proper collecting bag, we improvised by knotting up the openings in a tee-shirt, and then raced back to the tent with our captive prize. But, when we untied the shirt, to our amazement, the snake had actually laid a clutch of eggs en route! This was unbelievable icing on the cake, and we could only imagine how cool it would be to have, not just Mama, but a bunch of little babies as well!
We carefully kept the eggs in a plastic bag filled with damp paper towels until we arrived back home. Incubating snake eggs is a lot like rooting fig cuttings--they both have to be kept just humid enough, but not too humid--and mold is the Great Destroyer. We were a little worried, because some of the eggs didn't look as healthy the others, and we assumed that the bumpy trip in a knotted shirt had maybe caused her to lay the eggs prematurely, before all of them had been fully developed. Sadly, this appeared to be the case, because one by one, they started to grow mold and die.
So, being budding scientific types, whenever an egg would kick the bucket, we would snip it open with scissors to gauge what stage of development the embryo had reached. This went on for a couple of weeks until we had just one egg left, but it looked pretty good and we were very optimistic about it's chances. After all, it had to be getting close to full term! But, then, it, too, began sprouting mold--and that was all she wrote. Deeply disappointed, we solemnly snipped open the leathery shell and examined the tiny, almost fully-formed snake within. We stared at it for a moment, but something just didn't look right--it was too skinny, the eyes were too big.... Did the mold trigger some kind of weird birth defect?
Then the light dawned on both of us at once: "Hey, wait a minute! That's no kingsnake!" We hadn't been incubating a potential batch of herpetological royalty at all... instead, we'd been nursemaiding a mess of partially-digested, run-of-the-mill black racer eggs that the (probably male) "mother" kingsnake had eaten, and then regurgitated in the shirt when that bouncing journey back to the tent had unsettled its stomach. Talk about getting mislabeled cuttings from a disreputable source--our "Black Madeiras" turned out to be "Brown Turkeys" with a bad case of FMV!