Lady Guinea Beats Octo-Mom By Ten


Lady Guinea with her tribe

Last week Lady Guinea and Sassafras were due to hatch their eggs. I wrote about their dueling nests here. 

And an eventful week it was. I'll start with the good news first. Lady Guinea, out of the 23 eggs in her clutch, hatched 18 rambunctious, baby guinea keets. On Tuesday we knew the baby birds were due, so we checked up on LG and Sassy in the morning. Both were dutifully sitting on their nest, business as usual. LG's nest, however, had some peeping coming out of it. We knew some eggs had hatched.

Stealing babies from a guinea is no small feat. Guineas are aggressive around their babies, just ask our mail-lady. Whenever the guineas have babies I have to be very careful where I'm walking in the yard. Just this morning I thought I was fine on the other side of our garden planter. Nope. Within a couple seconds I had Lady Guinea perched on my arm pecking at my face. She's lucky I hadn't had my coffee yet and was barely coherent enough to fling her back on her babies.

To extract the little peepers from under her feathered shroud Sweetbreads donned her thickest boots and timidly stuck her toe near LG's nest. Not wanting to leave her eggs, LG pecked and squawked, alerting the male guineas to the infiltration. While the charade took place I came from behind and grabbed LG. Sweetbreads deftly snuck 7 keets into a box, I dropped LG, and off we went. Guinea Cent and his pals, in the meantime, had come to LG's rescue and were on the verge of attacking us. Luckily, we escaped their talons. The remaining 16 eggs were still under her. She hatched 11 more by Wednesday.

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Of Guineas and Guard Dogs

Almost two months ago I posted about the guinea egg mobile that we built and rolled out into the pastures. The purpose of the guinea egg mobile is for pest control, but eventually they'll also lay some might fine eggs. At the same time the egg mobile provides shade and shelter for the goats. The guineas are great foragers, so we feed them a nominal amount of feed in order to keep them coming back to the egg mobile, but other than that they’re on their own.


Guinea keets on their first day out
At first the guinea keets were still quite small (only 6 weeks old), so they remained in the coop, getting accustomed to home for another 3-4 weeks. We laid fresh hay on the floor of the coop and after about a week the keets would eat it and scratch it through the cracks. We would replace with new hay and the process repeats. It worked well, but we were really looking forward to having them out free-ranging.

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