Guineas: The New Flock
After our rat issue precipitated by over-wintering the guinea hens we have decided to only keep them from spring till fall and butcher them for meat. So, we butchered the birds last fall and have been eating them slowly over…
First Guinea Egg of the Year!
Having had so many eggs stolen toward the end of the last laying season, we were concerned that this season’s would all be spirited away before we had the chance to get to them. Much to my glee, this…
A Stranger in Our Midst
I found these perfect little tracks in the dust on top of the bins we keep our Guinea feed in the other day. I’m not well-versed in identifying animal tracks, but I do have a suspicion that they belong to…
Rat Trouble
As the weather has gotten cold we’ve had set up the Guinea’s for the winter. We’ve added a heat lamp to the coop, a water heater, and have been stocking the feeder with a lot more food since they aren’t…
Guinea Eggs
We knew they laid eggs, but last year the Guineas didn’t survive long enough to mature to the point that they actually produced eggs. This year they started laying them right around the 4th of July. The flock of 18…
They are still alive
This year they are surviving. We had a little attrition after we first released them, a few evenings some of them weren’t smart (or scared) enough to come into the coop and didn’t survive the night, but we have had…
Keets
We got the keets a lot later this year, they did not arrive until mid-March. After only a few weeks of living in the house we have succesfully moved them outdoors. They are a lot more skittish this year than…
Guinea Pens
We are getting guinea hens again this year. We are optimistic they will survive, but even if they don’t they are a worthwhile investment to keep the ticks at bay. However, this year we have a better approach to raising…
And then there were none
Our last guinea hen is now gone. Painfully, for the last few weeks the numbers have declined steadily. At the end of the day we would check the coop and sometimes they were all there, but typically one was missing….
Free like a bird, and dumb like a brick
The guineas are free. We finally decided to let them roam and do what we raised them to do – eat bugs and ticks from the yard. We opened the gates on their coop and it took only a minute…