We have some critters on the farm not everyone might be familiar with called Guinea fowl. As long as we’ve had them (around five years), you’d think we’d know more about them, but we really don’t. In fact, even if you did study them, I don’t think you’d ever get to where you could predict what they will do. From their name, I’d expect they are from the African nation of Guinea, or perhaps the Pacific Island nation of New Guinea. Either way, they have got to be among the craziest of all domestic (and I use that word lightly) animals that people raise. They are far from stupid, at least they can learn things that they seem to want to learn, but some of the antics they perform are beyond human concepts of insanity.
We keep them in a large coop inside a raccoon-proof pen, and early in the morning let them out to forage, this time of the year there’s not much provender out there, so we supplement their diet with corn and hen scratch. Just feeding these creatures can be an adventure and is not for the faint of heart. Every evening it has become a ritual here for me and one or both of my daughters to round up the “crazy birds” and put them in their coop for the night. This routine has itself become a rather entertaining event because, as mentioned, you never know what to expect from those maniacs.
No matter how many times we go through the exact same process, they never seem to learn – or at least some of them (and it’s not always the same ones). When you’re trying to drive them, one or more insist on going the wrong way, it’s just that there are times when they simply aren’t ready to go to bed (roost) and they can become a gigantic pain in the neck, especially on evenings when it’s beginning to rain or there’s some other situation going on where we need to promptly get them put away. First of all, guineas don’t drive, or herd, very well. Most of them will go the way you need them to, but a few always try to outrun you and go another way – usually the wrong way. Once in a while, I allow myself to believe that my trusty old dog, Dusty, might be of some help, after all she’s a mix of Border Collie and Australian Shepherd, a herding dog if there ever was one – dream on. Problem is, she’s old now and has never been trained to herd anything, so she thinks she’s supposed to go full speed right into the flock, and of course, this gives them the excuse they need to burst out in every direction, making it take much longer to gather them back up, but Dusty believes she’s doing a great job, and always looks back at me for approval and I don’t have the heart to tell her any different. She’s old and very hard of hearing, so when I yell at her to stop or come to me, she can’t hear so continues about her misdirecting. Most times, though, I try my best to get out of the house and go to the guinea roundup without her, and she just cannot understand why, since she is convinced she is of such great help.
For another twist in the experience, some evenings we go out and there’s nary a guinea in sight so we have to set about finding them, and once in a while they’ll end up being in a tree or in the barn, ready to roost just as if that’s where they always go, and you’d think they would know better, but no. Often enough, when we get them together and are driving them to the pen they run right past the gate screaming, “We’re not ready for bed yet!” Ever so often, they congregate in the goat pen next door, and it can be a challenge to get them over the little 3-foot-high fence. They absolutely forget they can fly, and I have personally watched them for hours racing back and forth up and down that fence trying to get to the other side, stopping to quickly poke their head through ever so often as though a hole is going to magically appear in the fence – all the way up and down the fence – for hours. And the goat just stands there watching them and shaking his head. I’ve learned that if you run towards them waving your arms and shouting, they suddenly remember how to fly and will sail over the fence in a blind panic, to regroup on the other side and plot how they will cause further mayhem.
Guineas exhibit traits of wild animals and are impossible to tame. No matter how many times you put food in their coop, as soon as you open the door, all havoc breaks loose. They start honking and screaming to make sure everyone is in a state of avian madness, flying into the opposite side of the coop, screeching and flopping, with tornadoes of feathers everywhere. I put food and water in their cage every day, and you’d think they’d get used to it, but each time they are fully convinced that this is the day I’m going to make guinea buffalo wings, and they freak out accordingly.
A few years ago, we had a white guinea rooster who liked to harass the chicken roosters, and he could put on a show. It wasn’t uncommon to see one of the roosters running full speed across the yard with that guinea right behind him, usually hanging on with a beak full of tail feathers. He broke his leg somehow, and earned the name “Hopalong”, and I figured when he got wounded that his rooster fighting days were over, but boy was I wrong! He could run almost as fast on that one leg and would still chase and viciously attack the rooster. Someone forgot to tell the maniac that his leg was broken. No one needed to tell the poor rooster this thing was insane, though. I have absolutely no doubt that guinea would have murdered the rooster and probably drank his blood if he could have. Can you imagine being a rooster and having to live in a yard with a terroristic monster like Hopalong?
There are two coops in the pen, one in which we keep a couple of younger guineas to prevent them from being slaughtered and eaten by the grown ones. The other coop is where we keep the adult mindless savages. The coops are parallel to each other with a narrow passage between them, and when we try to get them to go into the right coop, if there is only one person trying to do the deed, my daughter said it’s like playing a game of Lolo. If you don’t know what Lolo is, it’s a tricky old-school Nintendo game where you try and make the characters go places and they try to go to other places. Our guineas are masterful at Lolo.
What prompted this post was a guinea last night that I ran out of patience trying to get into the coop. He was bound and determined not to even go in the pen, so I finally resolved to let him camp out. We got freezing rain last night and he had to roost under the shed we keep the chicken roosters in. I went out first thing this morning to try and locate him and as I approached the chicken yard, I heard the roosters laughing and taunting the unfortunate guinea under them. He was icy from the freezing rain and did not offer any resistance to going where he belonged into the guinea coop, whereas the night before he breathlessly ran past the gate several times to avoid bedtime. Amazing what a cold night alone does for the attitude, of even the most hardened villain.
Later,
MK