Backyard Poultry Forum

hey guys how about them guinea fowl?

i love those crazy scoot about chooks . . . . . . . . in fact bought 3 more today.
they were really well behaved considering i got all grabby on them within 3 minutes of them ever seeing me.
glad really as we were in a car park next to an orchard and they could have scooted into the distance easy as.

i have been missing the guinea stories as lately there have been none; i check most days.

have your guineas done anything cool or scooter chook u would like to share?
if not i will be forced to talk to myself.

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whomever lives longest wins

this is a guinea / chook story - i swapped abreeder some guineas a while ago and brought home the 2 half grown cinnie guineas i got and wasnt sure of which krew i was going to allocate them to. those 2 guineas spotted their "mamma" across the yard with their now brothers & sisters and were determined they had to get to mamma. they squealed and went totally off trying to escape their prison - pen. eventually i let them out and even now months later they are 2 of the 3 that roost with mamma each night in a house. the other 5 go up the big tree; frosts and all.

i asked abreeder and their first mamma was also a wheaten marans girl - these guys arent rocket scientists but they love their mamma.

edited to remove abreeders name - humble apologies abreeder i was 3 days into a rather bad 4 day headache.

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whomever lives longest wins

last weekend i released our last hatch of summer/autum keets and their fluffybutt mamma (australorp) from the bitchbox for a couple of hours in the afternoon sun. fluffybutt was bits stir crazy with 5 frisky babies & her in lockdown so she showed them the grass, bushes, dust bath n other chook stuff.

by the time i found where they had wandered to she was down to 4 babies. BUGGER. i hunted around and found a heap of little feathers just the paddock side of their fence, OMG i wanted to puke.

never one to give up easy i looked around the place no baby in any of the chook houses, up the tree or the house yard. so ultimately, i was forced to resort to thinking like a chicken - something my OH says i shouldn't tell people i do. so don't tell anyone but thinking like a baby chicken i wandered back to the pile of feathers and looked around . . . . . . . . . . . . if i were a baby chicken and not dead where would i hide. it's quite obvious i would wiggle n jiggle in behind the donkeys water trough until i wedged myself in tight. yep, that is where lucky was hiding. so i dragged that guinea out - grabbed fluffybutt and other 4 and slam dunked them all back in the bitchbox.

5 days later and fluffybutt isn't wanting to escape again, yet & lucky is short quite a few feathers but going strong.

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whomever lives longest wins

Love your stories keep em commin.

our first guinea fowl experience over 5 years ago was with a lovely sultan who came with 5 tiny guinea keets. she became known as saltymamma with time and she raised those babies great. until the day she passed that little saltymamma never walked alone; her 5 became "quite a few" they treated her as the mamma of all. saltymamma was not known for being a layer chook laying 5 or 6 eggs, going clucky and having 2 or 3 hatches each year.

the end of saltymamma's hatching days started with me cruising out to check on her needs chatting about it being such a nice day - i peaked in the window to see if she needed fresh water and to my horror the tiny little chook was covered in a 4 foot long black "worm" draped around and back(so creepy) trying to get at her eggs. saltymammy was sitting tight, such a tiny chook and so brave.

i ran back to the house screaming get the shovel; i'm getting the gun its saltymamma. damn that guns and ammo have to be kept seperate and locked and in the freaking shed that is locked too. returning to the chook house bloke had lifted saltys kennel so he could excise the "worm"; however it was making tracks out between the corrrugated iron and concrete floor. he shouted ur gonna have to shoot it. so i did. he finished the job with me shouting do u want me to shoot it again. apparently not; you dont have to if it is in 2 pieces.

while standing in the shed doorway shaking, holding a gun i told my bloke dont tell me to harden up anymore.
he said ok and he hasn't.

salty hatched those eggs but was unable to keep track of them scoot about chicks so they were raised inside and she retired from super mamma duties.




RIP saltymamma u r an awesome little chook.

=============================
Language cleaned up. Substituting symbols still counts as swearing.

sorry.

edited to apologise for fowl language.

i became interested in guinea fowl while living in a unit in the middle of town. quite possibly not the best chook option for a unit yard with all the noise not to mention the keeping them in it type issues.

so firstly i liked them as a shape and form before i had ever seen one in the feathers. i was studying art & design and one day we had a speaker a ceramic artist called ange russi (not sure of the spelling). she had a range of teapots and cups done as guinea fowl. i was entranced, the spots the shape and lovely delicate teapots and cups. pictured below is one of her more recent guineas as during my studies i could not afford them and more recently i have not seen any of the original ones i loved long ago. one day.



after that day i looked guinea fowl up and saw that she had done a good representation of them and was smitten. so a dozen years later we moved to the country and had space for feathered friends. i pick for us GUINEAS and haven't regretted choosing those lovely looking scooter chooks.

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whomever lives longest wins

i hate foxes
really really do.
not like snakes that totally creep me out doing what they do.
not like rats that scuttle past my head when i check on our chooks in the dark.
not like the bats that used to fall down the vent from the stove into the house & would fly over us in the night and my bloke would say in the morning i think you imagined it until the weekend when i woke him in the night and he freaked the flip out about the flying vermin.

i hate foxes and for so many reasons and all of them were awesome chooks(4 me: if u lay an egg u r a chook).

last summer i had a totally committed guinea fowl mamma-to-be that decided on our donkey shelter as her nest site. i had been happily robbing the nest for weeks and missed a couple of days so she had an awesome pile. the fox/es hadn't taken any eggs & 2 donkeys and a raggy mini pony all on guard duty; i thought what the hay let a little girl have a go. bloke and i put 2 half pieces of a tree guard one each way that made small gaps and secured her inside with water and food. you go girl!

next morning with fresh water and treats i went to see how she went overnight on the ground. getting close things were a bit wierd, she had shuffled forward and sitting strange and her head was gone. the fox/es couldn't get her out but ate her head and drank her blood. poor poor chooky girl never gonna be a mamma.

and last friday they took 3 of our sweet swedish ducks that lived to quank it up in the yard.


i hate foxes.

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whomever lives longest wins

hey guys i know i am not the only one with stories to put out there in a sharing likeminded arena.
i can do this by myself and i will but as in life there are sooooooo many things that are way more fun if at least 1 friend lends a hand.

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whomever lives longest wins

Grabby - my sympathies for your losses

You have convinced me to get scooter chooks when I get back to Darwin and have a few acres. Your stories make me want to see their antics myself and hopefully create some stories to tell.

Hopefully others with scooter chooks will tell some of their stories as they sound like entertaining birds and their habit of wandering where ever they want must surely land them in some interesting situtitations.

Cheers

Eire

hey Eire
it is great to know that i have recruited another guinea believer!
they are way cool critters and i think you will enjoy their antics in person when you have the space.

they do love to wander about the place; not just our place or the neighbours horse paddocks either side. they love to cross the road out front with the cars whizzing past at 100 kms p/hour to lay their egg. i have to admit shoulder high grass is very tempting especially since the council make no attempt to maintain it so it stays nice and private. it's very hard if not nearly impossible to keep a keen guinea girl out of that grass when she wants to have babies of her own.

one sunny day last summer my bloke heard the familiar zoom thud zoom of a guinea being hit on the road out front. he went out to pick up our dead guinea only to find a twofer deal and feathers everywhere. first he moved the one right in the middle of the road off; then to the one near the edge. while bending down, she flew from her side straight up into his face then across the road with a big wad of stuffing hanging out her back. it turns out spite can inspire someone to live on and on because stuffing has survived. 6 months on & her wad of stuffing eventually preened back into place but she will always be stuffing for us.

stuffing still crosses the road as chickens do but at a faster pace than previously.

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whomever lives longest wins

Loving these stories Gabby
My guineas are boring only funny thing they do as they don't roost high they every night roost on a old eBay chicken coop that sits in the big run (filled with hay and chooks love to lay in it) which is about 1.2 meters high. But every night at bed time they all roost on top of the eBay coop which I then have to individually pick each one up and place in secure house every night. Thankfully my guineas are very placid and don't mind being handled

I lived/worked in East Timor for 18 months and got very familiar with having chickens all over the roads and running in every direction. What I do not understand, was why they deliberatly wait until you have almost reached them, then decide to run across in front of the vehicle. I think they dare each other and they get points if they just run and just miss being hit, if they need to flap their wings they loose points and if they have to fly - no points.

All timorese chickens that I saw were small, scrawny and very fast(but very tasty). There was one chicken, during my second stint there, that we called Speedy Gonzales as every time we passed she would do the dash. This went on for 12 months and she was very skilled. Normally when we see chickens we would slow down, very occasionally we would hit one and sometimes kill it. I hit Speedy,glancing blows, at least twice and some of the others reackon they hit her also. In the end she was that good at judgeing distance and speed we didn't even bother to slow down for her. She would of had an amazing points tally and was a point of conversation over beers. If road running chickens had a hall of fame she would have been in it.

After experiencing them for a while you learn where the joke - why did the chicken cross the road and the phrase/game 'playing chicken' came from.

Hopefull the guineas are not as stupid as chickens as being more of a flock animal one vehicle could kill quite a few.

The back end of Darwin should hopefully not have too much traffic and even so hopefull they breed quicker than fate catchs up with them.

Eire

hey Eire
don't keep us in suspence did speedy gonzales survive to the end of your second time in east timor?
or was she tasty?


in my kitchen i have a sign i made that says:
why do chickens act so?
chickens have a small brain
please don't act like you do too.

i cannot vouch for guinea intelligence but IMO they use a larger percentage of their brain than we do.

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whomever lives longest wins

Speedy done her normal dash across the road when I went to the airport for the final time. That was in 2008.

She was not our chook so I suspect when she got old enough and slowed down enough to be caught she ended up in her owners stomach

It is difficult to decide if she was stupid for running in front of vehicles every chance she got or very clever to continualy live through the experiences.

I never seen her with chicks, I presume the roosters could catch her.

Prehaps she was an adrenaline junkie and the continual high levels of adrenaline and other stress hormones stopped her from laying

I think I will put the guinea house at the back of the 5 acres when I get them, that should hopefully reduce the amount of J walking birds.

nah dude an awesome fit chookie like that is scooting across the road all hopped up on adrenaline still now.
death can't catch her and until someone u trust tells u different then that's how it is.

we have no proof of otherwise.

u go speedie chookie girl!

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whomever lives longest wins