Guinea Fowl

    Hey!  I'm back and today I am going to write about my mother's Guinea Fowl.  Some time ago one of my Mom's friends gave us four Guinea fowl.  We gave them a variety of different nicknames such as Guinea hens, Gooney birds and my dad tends to call them Dodo birds because they aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer.
    Our four Guinea fowl paraded around for quite a while gazing at themselves in our porch window and making a fuss whenever anything changed.  They were like our patrol birds, alerting us of anything out of the ordinary.
    Well, after an unfortunate turn of events, we were left with only two Guinea fowl and the pack was in danger of no longer existing on our little farm.  Luckily the two left were a girl and a boy, so we had some chance of building back up our patrol birds.  In addition to not being very smart, they are incredibly bad mothers.
   This year, my mom took the eggs from the mother Guinea fowl and decided to hatch them herself.
    We used the farm innovators incubator.  This was our second run in with an incubator.  Since we didn't hatch any eggs at all the first time around, we were expecting to hatch only a few Guinea fowl to rebuild our herd.
    It was rather surprising when bird after bird continued to hatch.  We ended with 13 healthy Guinea fowl and soon the little box we kept them in became to small to hold all the birds without changing the paper towels all the time.  We moved them to the basement and kept a heat lamp on them at all times in a larger area.
    The keets were extremely hard to care for because of splayed legs and bent toes.  They had to wear sandals made from cardboard and tape around their legs.  Guinea fowl need paper towels for there living area while they are growing so they don't slide and fall.  My mother tried using paper towels with decorative dots on them but the birds kept pecking them and she changed the towels back to plain.
    When the Guinea fowl were old enough, we moved them to the chicken coop where we lost one bird to an unknown mishap.  The birds are still comfortably living in the chicken coop and remain very destructive to this day having broken the heat lamp bulb and then the whole heat lamp, but they continue to amuse us time and time again.  We plan to let them out of the coop two at a time so that they will remain on the property.
    Until next time,
Meredith