{"id":2151,"date":"2011-08-11T13:08:41","date_gmt":"2011-08-11T20:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?p=2151"},"modified":"2011-10-15T12:15:28","modified_gmt":"2011-10-15T19:15:28","slug":"guineas-gone-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?p=2151","title":{"rendered":"Guineas Gone Wild."},"content":{"rendered":"

**Note from the author:\u00a0 OK, so I forgot to post Part 2 and Part 3 of\u00a0 my article for Farm To Table.\u00a0 There have been some complaints<\/span> whining <\/span>questions from people who want to know how it all ended.\u00a0 So I am posting the article in its entirety below.\u00a0 Please be aware that this article revolves around events that took place in May and June, so it’s a bit out of sequence with the rest of the blog.\u00a0 Especially since I wrote about some of the guineas’ antics in my earlier post, “Circumstances.”\u00a0 I tried to fix that but after 30 minutes of trying to display this post under June archives while simultaneously having it be current on Facebook, I got pissed off<\/span> weepy <\/span>bored with it and decided to leave it as it is.\u00a0 Please enjoy.\u00a0 And if you have any further complaints<\/span> whining<\/span> questions, please feel free to email them to complaints<\/span> whining<\/span> questions@my[spam]farmblog[spam].com. <\/span>If you don’t get a reply, I apologize.\u00a0 Sometimes my spam blocker has a mind of its own and deletes legitimate emails.\u00a0 Go figure.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Guineas Gone Wild.<\/span><\/strong>
\n<\/span><\/em><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>Guineas don’t do spring break.\u00a0 They don’t need a road trip and a beach to wreak havoc when the temperatures start to rise.\u00a0 They can create chaos just fine at home, thank you.\u00a0 And they do.<\/p>\n

It began in May when their already exploratory nature became practically nomadic.\u00a0 Instead of 13 guineas roosting comfortably in the barn each night, I began to find only 10.\u00a0 Or 8.\u00a0 Or 5!\u00a0 Occasionally one would stumble in just as I was finishing the evening chores, disheveled and shaking his head as if to say, “You would not believe what went down underneath the cedar tree today, boys.\u00a0 You would just not believe.”\u00a0 Their usually tight knit group broke into ever-changing cliques, the males took to chasing each other, the females, and even a stray hen or two around the barn yard, and I think I\u00a0 found a few tags scrawled on the backside of the chicken coop.\u00a0 Although that could have been the rooster stirring the pot a bit.<\/p>\n

This behavior resulted, as this type of behavior always does, in disaster.\u00a0 You can only spend the night huddled under the rose bush, too exhausted from procreational activities to drag yourself home, once or twice before the fox catches on.\u00a0 Setting up a love nest on the backside of the pond with your latest sweetie is charming, cozy, and right in coyote territory.\u00a0 Deciding to cross the road in search of new stomping grounds means, well, crossing the road.\u00a0 The road with logging trucks and soccer moms late for practice going at least 10 miles over the speed limit.\u00a0 Of course, flying over the perimeter fencing into the neighbor’s yard isn’t a better choice.\u00a0 The neighbor harbors a shotgun and an extreme hatred of guineas.\u00a0 I tried telling him that guineas eat ticks.\u00a0 Deer ticks.\u00a0 Deer ticks that carry disease.\u00a0 Deer ticks that carry disease and are dropped by the deer that gather in his yard.\u00a0 Deer ticks that carry disease and are dropped by the deer that gather in his yard because he actually FEEDS THE DEER.\u00a0 But just the fact that he actually FEEDS THE DEER tells you what kind of crazed and unreasonable person he is.\u00a0 I bet he has kinfolk that put out those corn on the cob feeders for squirrels.\u00a0 Feeding deer and squirrels….I mean, really.\u00a0 Who does that?<\/p>\n

So by the time June rolled around there were only 8 guineas remaining.\u00a0 Meaning that their frenzied attempts to reproduce had actually resulted in fewer members of the flock instead of more.\u00a0 Which made me wonder, not for the first time, how in the world guineas managed to live in the wild.\u00a0 Sometimes it seemed like each guinea’s only plan for survival is to simply hope that there’s someone in the flock dumber than him or herself.\u00a0 Although, I admit that’s how I got through math in high school.\u00a0 Too bad there’s no curve in real life as generous as the curve in Mr Greer’s calculus class.<\/p>\n

Of course, this all meant I had to step in to preserve my remaining birds and replace the ones I lost.\u00a0 Around here, it means you have really messed up badly when I have to step in.\u00a0 Since my own ratio of wins to losses is pretty shaky, my intervention is like going on a talk show to repair a relationship.\u00a0 Scary, scary stuff.\u00a0 As soon as the goats saw me surreptitiously gathering guinea eggs from the nests, they knew there was going to be trouble.\u00a0 Brianna, my herd queen, muttered to her daughter, Magenta, “This kind of behavior is how we ended up with kids being born in December last year when it was 20 degrees outside.”\u00a0 “Don’t I know it,”\u00a0 commiserated Magenta, “Don’t I know it.”\u00a0 As if it’s such a big deal to make a mistake on the goat gestational calendar.\u00a0 As if I didn’t pay for that mistake by having to run heat lamps and hair dryers and invest in kidding coats.\u00a0 Jeez.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>With guinea eggs stolen and safely tucked into the incubator I started on the second part of my plan.\u00a0 Hatching my own keets was smart (Plan A), but I’ve learned over the years that having a back-up plan (the infamous Plan B) is even smarter.\u00a0 Plan B involved locking 4 guineas in the garden and had the huge bonus of letting them patrol the garden for their own food.\u00a0 Since guineas don’t scratch or eat lots of greens like chickens, this allowed me to have natural and organic bug control (the guineas eating garden pests) while simultaneously maintaining at least 4 members of the flock in a safe and controlled environment.\u00a0 The bonus bonus was no more coming up from harvesting vegetables covered in little seed ticks. The bonus bonus bonus was that if I put in 1 male and 3 females, then I knew any eggs laid would be fertile and at least one hen would be likely to go broody and hatch out some young.\u00a0 The bonus bonus bonus bonus was having guineas corralled in the garden right next to the house adjacent to our property line that was foreclosed on earlier in the year.\u00a0 Prospective buyers were sure to hear the guineas’ loud raucous alarm calls when they viewed the property, politely decline to make an offer, and sooner or later the bank would get desperate enough to accept our puny proposal of 1\/3 of the house’s asking price.\u00a0 Pure evil genius.\u00a0 Mwahahahaha.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Plan B entailed putting up an 8 foot chain link fence around the garden to keep the guineas in and predators out.\u00a0 Plus hauling the chicken tractor all the way down the farm drive and clearing a level spot in the garden for it so it could be a guinea house.\u00a0 Also putting some rivets into shade cloth and driving stakes to hang it in several locations to provide a break from the garden’s full sun.\u00a0 Never mind spending several nights trying to track down and catch 4 of the remaining guineas when they roosted for the night.\u00a0 Why is it that a guinea will bed down for 3 consecutive nights under the deck stairs, but as soon as you sneak out to capture him you find him 10 feet up in a pine tree?<\/p>\n

That joyful procedure went along with my attempts to definitively determine which guineas were male and which were female so that I could choose 1 male and 3 females for the garden.\u00a0 Supposedly guinea males have bigger wattles than females.\u00a0 But when they’re agitated (i.e being chased around the barn yard) all their wattles perfuse with blood making them equally red and enlarged.\u00a0 Furthermore, guinea males make a one note alarm call while females make a two note call which, according to the literature, sounds like “buck-wheat, buck-wheat.”\u00a0 Have you ever heard a bird say, “Buck-wheat”?\u00a0 Yeah, me neither.\u00a0 And if I did I’d have that talking bird in the circus in a skinny minute and never farm another day in my life.\u00a0 In the end I managed to catch 4 guineas, clip their wings, toss them in the garden, and just had to let them work out the gender logistics on their own. \u00a0 What, you thought all those bonuses came without a little sweat equity?\u00a0 Please, this is a farm.\u00a0 It doesn’t come with an Easy button.<\/p>\n

I soon had evidence that the Fates were on my side, though.\u00a0 One evening there were only 3 guineas up in the barn yard for dinner.\u00a0 Frantic that the remaining 4 free ranging guineas had dropped in number, I searched the property.\u00a0 Lo and behold, I found a female covering what looked like 20 or 30 eggs in a nest in the back pasture.\u00a0 She had a reasonable position under a pallet and was in an area patrolled by the livestock guardian dog.\u00a0 As long as the livestock guardian dog didn’t start sneakily eating her eggs (something I suspect happens on occasion to broody poultry but have yet to witness), she had a decent chance of hatching her brood.\u00a0 I was sure that other guineas would continue to lay eggs under her, resulting in varying hatch times, but that happens so frequently around here that we’ve almost got that madness down to a controlled science.\u00a0 As long as you use the loose definition of “controlled.”\u00a0 So with a little help from a determined guinea hen, I now had a Plan C.<\/p>\n

Imagine my surprise a few days later when I stopped by the feed mill for my usual check-book-defying feed order and was told by the owner that he was expecting a special delivery in a few weeks.\u00a0 “More chicks?”\u00a0 I asked, knowing that his spring orders had sold very well.\u00a0 “Nope,” he said, “Guinea keets.”\u00a0 Oh, sunny, sunny day.\u00a0 A Plan D!!\u00a0 I was confident that at least one of my other plans would work.\u00a0 But I wouldn’t be ashamed to buy keets from the feed mill.\u00a0 No, sirree.\u00a0 Independence and self sufficiency is important in farming.\u00a0 So is realism.\u00a0 Besides,\u00a0 how can we save the economy if we don’t support our small locally owned businesses?\u00a0 If buying guinea keets is what it takes to keep my flock from dying out and support economic recovery, then buying guinea keets is exactly what I’ll do.\u00a0 I’m very patriotic that way.\u00a0 And kind of desperate.\u00a0 Possibly even out of other options.\u00a0 Whatever.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to say when things started going wrong.\u00a0 I guess it all began when I found that 1 guinea had flown out of the garden and it appeared to be a female.\u00a0 Leaving me with what looked like 2 males and 1 female combing the bean plants for bugs.\u00a0 Well, combing the bean plants inbetween when the 2 males were trying to kill each other.\u00a0 As it happened, a free ranging guinea was hit by a car a few days later and I found her lying in the driveway with a broken leg.\u00a0 Aha!\u00a0 She was a perfect candidate to go in the garden.\u00a0 Another female and a guinea with not much means of escape.\u00a0 So I had 4 guineas in the garden again and the gender issue a bit more evened out.\u00a0 Until she died.\u00a0 Leaving me with only 7 guineas total and a sinking feeling in my gut.\u00a0 Good thing the eggs in the incubator were due to hatch soon.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And those eggs seemed to be developing just fine.\u00a0 Well, the ones that were fertile anyway.\u00a0 Candling had already revealed that out of the 36 eggs I set in the incubator, only 18 were fertile.\u00a0 I honestly didn’t understand how that was possible with all the sexual hijinks that had been going on in the guinea flock.\u00a0 I suppose that the males had been too busy posturing and battling for possession and territory to actually consummate their victories.\u00a0 It really surprises me that there aren’t more matriarchal societies in the world.\u00a0 It really does.\u00a0 But the developing eggs had already changed from a black eye dot in a nest of spidery veins to breathing, kicking shadows filling the eggs.\u00a0 Oh, we were so excited when they began to hatch.\u00a0 We were still excited when only 5 hatched out on their own.\u00a0 We were hopeful when we had to assist 3 more out of their shells.\u00a0 Our hope started to slip when 2 of those 3 died. But then a couple more eggs got external pips and finally released 2 of our favorite type of keets—the chipmunk colored ones that grow up to be a beautiful pearl gray.\u00a0 That was it.\u00a0 8 out of 18.\u00a0 Not a spectacular addition to my record of wins and losses.\u00a0 What is 8 out of 18?\u00a0 Not exactly a strike or a gutter ball.\u00a0 Perhaps, a scratch?\u00a0 A foul?\u00a0 A sign that I should invest more than $20 in a cheap styrofoam incubator where I hand turn the eggs and mist them with a sprayer bottle to adjust humidity?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I felt a little bad as I emptied the incubator of the eggs that didn’t make it and bleached it clean.\u00a0 Until the next day, when the guinea hunkered down in the back pasture hatched out her nest.\u00a0 We arrived in the barn yard for the morning milking and found her strutting around with 3 gray balls and 2 chipmunk colored balls of fluff. 5??!!\u00a0 5 out of approx. 30 eggs??!!\u00a0 We rushed over to the nest site and found she had made a rookie mistake.\u00a0 She got off the nest with the first early hatchers and didn’t wait for those that were just a few hours behind.\u00a0 We gathered any eggs that were peeping or had external pips and rushed them back to the house.\u00a0 Where I hurriedly set up the incubator amidst much grumbling about how I had just bleached the darn thing and put it all carefully away.\u00a0 When the eggs were safely rescued and placed under the incubator’s warmth, we returned to the morning chores.\u00a0 Pretty and I clucked our tongues and shook our heads at the mother guinea’s dismal results.\u00a0 “At least we did better than she did,”\u00a0 Pretty remarked as we opened the brooder box to put in fresh water.\u00a0 And discovered 2 of our incubated keets had died overnight from pasty butt.\u00a0 Pride goeth before a fall, people, pride goeth before a fall.<\/p>\n

That afternoon we returned to the back pasture to escort the free range mother guinea and her young into a separate pen and house where they could be protected and get special feed.\u00a0 “Escort” is probably not the proper term.\u00a0 The incident actually involved a lot of chasing with a net, cursing when she would fly out of our reach, and shrieking when she attacked us.\u00a0 Never mind that these maneuvers had to be carried out while being ever mindful of 5 teeny, precious keets scurrying under our feet.\u00a0 In desperation, Pretty snatched a keet from close to her and held it up for the mother to see.\u00a0 Then she slowly walked toward the pen where we wanted the guinea to go.\u00a0 This is a trick that works great with a duck.\u00a0 A mother duck will see you clutching one of her babies, listen to its frantic peeps, and charge you in a furious rush.\u00a0 You keep moving towards the destination, she keeps coming, and eventually everybody ends up where they need to be.\u00a0 The only tricky part is giving the mother back the duckling without losing your finger in process.\u00a0 Which seems like Easy Street compared to conducting this process with a guinea mother.<\/p>\n

The first problem was that the captured guinea keet didn’t peep.\u00a0 He just went still and quiet in Pretty’s hand.\u00a0 So although we had one of the guinea’s babies, she seemed totally unaware of it.\u00a0 Or she didn’t care because she had still had 4 left and, believe me, 4 children is enough for anyone.\u00a0 I’m not sure which.\u00a0 So we decided to grab all the babies and then she’d have to pay attention.\u00a0 I chased her off to the side with the net and Pretty went after the keets.\u00a0 Which is when we ran into the second problem.\u00a0 Unlike ducklings, guinea keets don’t stand still and huddle together for protection when their mother leaves their side.\u00a0 Instead they fan out over the ground, finding a leaf or branch to camouflage themselves against and sit very, very still and quiet.\u00a0 It’s an impressive survival tactic (especially for a guinea).\u00a0 It’s also a very frustrating one.\u00a0 By the time we had tracked down all 4 keets, the mother had gotten bored with the whole process and headed off to eat breakfast with the chickens.\u00a0 And even then all 5 keets together wouldn’t peep when they were being held.\u00a0 Little, who had wandered outside to observe all the hub-bub, was amazed at this.\u00a0 “Mommy,” he called, “They’ve been keet-napped and they don’t even know it!”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Good thing that Ingenuity was actually our first choice for the name of this farm.\u00a0 We only changed it when we realized Ingenuity is one of those words that starts to sound made up after you say it out loud a bunch of times in a row.\u00a0 But even if it we ditched it as a name for the farm, we still have it.\u00a0 So we grabbed an empty strawberry basket, put the keets under it in the middle of the pen where we wanted the mother, and backed away to see what happened.\u00a0 Of course, what happened was the keets overturned it and started to escape, but after we rushed back in, snagged them, and put them under the basket with\u00a0 a large rock on top, we quietly took position on the side of the barn.\u00a0 Once the keets thought we were gone, they finally began calling for their mother.\u00a0 I’m not sure but it sounded a little like “buck-wheat, buck-wheat.”\u00a0 (Just kidding!\u00a0 Keets don’t talk any better than adult guineas!!)\u00a0 And when the mother had her fill of grain, she finally lifted her head and warily started toward the pen.\u00a0 Oh, she knew it was a trick because she hesitated for a long time at the entrance. And she went around the perimeter of the pen several times, searching for a less obvious opening. But eventually she wanted her babies too much to avoid it (Or like any other mother she couldn’t stand the whining anymore and just gave in.\u00a0 Kind of like buying a candy bar when you’re in the check out aisle.\u00a0 You know it’s a scam but, for Pete’s sake, if it provides even 2 minutes of peace and quiet it’s soooo worth it!).\u00a0 Voila!\u00a0 After only, well, I don’t know how long it took, but I know it required me to open a bottle of Diet Coke to recover from the stress of it when we got back into the house, we had the mother guinea and her 5 keets safely penned up.\u00a0 The tide was turning in our favor in regards to the survival of the guineas.\u00a0 Or so I thought.<\/p>\n

After dirtying up my nice clean and sanitized incubator, only 2 of the rescued eggs hatched out.\u00a0 Which was only worth the hassle of having to clean it all over again because they were both pearl grays.\u00a0 Also, because I didn’t have to do it.\u00a0 Middle was willing to carry off all the rotten eggs, scrub off egg shells and hatching goo, and bleach out the ‘bator in return for 15 minutes on the computer.\u00a0 He used that time to play several rounds of Angry Birds.\u00a0 Which is kind of ironic, don’t you think?<\/p>\n

In any case, I added the 2 newly hatched keets to the ones remaining in the brooder box.\u00a0 Watching them all stretch out to snooze under the heat lamp, I sighed.\u00a0 “It’s kind of like 2 steps forward and one step back,” I said to Big, who had come into the barn to see what he could do to earn Angry Bird time.\u00a0 “Actually, it’s exactly 2 steps forward and 2 steps back.\u00a0 Didn’t you have 8 keets this morning, 2 died, 2 new ones were born, and now you still only have 8?”\u00a0 At that point I told him the only chore I had available to earn computer time was scrubbing under the rim of the toilet bowls with a toothbrush.\u00a0 Take that, smarty pants.<\/p>\n

It went downhill fast from there.\u00a0 The next morning we discovered that the guinea mother that we had so carefully escorted to her own pen had smothered one of her keets.\u00a0 The next morning she had killed another one.\u00a0 With a heavy heart, I removed her remaining keets, added them to the brooder box, and set her loose.\u00a0 The difficulty with domesticated animals is sometimes they just don’t have enough natural instinct remaining to manage on their own.\u00a0 And around here the only person they have to help them is me.\u00a0 Which is, at least, better than the neighbor with the shotgun.\u00a0 By a smidgen.<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, one of the female guineas in the garden disappeared.\u00a0 For the next several days, I painstakingly counted bald grey guinea heads during the morning feeding for the free range poultry by the chicken coop.\u00a0 I was hoping she had just gotten out of the fence and would reappear loose in the barn yard.\u00a0 No.\u00a0 She was gone.\u00a0 Probably picked off by a raccoon or opossum strong enough to climb the chain link and smart enough to realize it was just outside the reach of the livestock guardian.\u00a0 A raccoon or opossum that would be sure to come back again.<\/p>\n

By now you’ve probably lost track of how many days went by and how many guineas and keets we had in the barn yard, the garden, and the brooder box.\u00a0 Good.\u00a0 Because we lost track, too.\u00a0 It just goes to show you what an incredible writer I am that you can experience the chaos and confusion with us.\u00a0 In case you didn’t have enough chaos and confusion in your own life.\u00a0 Or if you’d like to feel like your chaos and confusion isn’t even half as bad as ours.\u00a0 You’re welcome.<\/p>\n

But I hate to leave my readers in the dark.\u00a0 So I’ll tell you that on the last day of June, a guinea suddenly reappeared, digging with the chickens among the scraps pile.\u00a0 A guinea with 9 fluffy little keets stumbling around her toes.\u00a0 Including 4 pearl greys.\u00a0 I don’t know where she was hiding her nest or how long she had been gone.\u00a0 But she was proud enough to parade them around the barn yard several times, fierce enough to chase off any hen, duck, or goat that looked at her sideways, and smart enough to steer them to the feed trough and the automatic waterers without any assistance from me.\u00a0 She got all her help from Mother Nature, who’s a much better farmer than me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And seeing that guinea got me to thinking.\u00a0 I went down to the garden and started looking around.\u00a0 But this time I wasn’t looking for the chunk of scattered feathers or bits of grisly gore left behind by a raccoon or opossum.\u00a0 This time I was looking under bushes, beneath the tarp covering the compost, and behind the stumps we use as garden chairs.\u00a0 Sure enough, tucked under a thicket of blackberry canes, was my missing guinea.\u00a0 The one I hoped had simply escaped, but feared had been eaten.\u00a0 All along she had been setting her eggs.\u00a0 Safe.\u00a0 Hidden.\u00a0 Determined to do a better job than me of replenishing the numbers in the guinea flock.\u00a0 So we’ll be heading into July with 8 adult guineas, 17 keets, and even more to come.\u00a0 Just imagine what next spring will be like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

**Note from the author:\u00a0 OK, so I forgot to post Part 2 and Part 3 of\u00a0 my article for Farm To Table.\u00a0 There have been some complaints whining questions from people who want to know how it all ended.\u00a0 So I am posting the article in its entirety below.\u00a0 Please be aware that this article […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[125,17,19,51,20],"class_list":["post-2151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-brooder-room","tag-garden","tag-guineas","tag-incubator","tag-keets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2151"}],"version-history":[{"count":106,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3018,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151\/revisions\/3018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}