The Guinea Fowl Inn - open for businessKING OF BLOGS

Sunday, December 13, 2009

The Guinea Fowl Inn - open for business

Alright, now don’t fall off your chairs or out of your beds – but it’s me. Yes, really. See, all those reports of my untimely death have been greatly exaggerated. Again. Oh well, what can I say? I can but hang my head in shame at my neglected blog and tell you that mostly I’ve just not had the energy to blog and have spent the last month trying to get well. Does that sound like a reasonable enough excuse? It had better, it’s the only one I’ve got.

So, that aside, I have to report that the Guinea Fowl Inn is back in business. Yep, it’s that time of year and my newly planted lawn is once again going to pot as ravening hordes of guinea fowl and their keets come flocking through. The first lot that stopped by, half of them rescued from the neighbour’s pool (why she thought it was okay to fish them out and hand them to us over the wall is beyond me…), are already quite big and are getting their spots and starting to look ugly in that bulldog, I mean teenage guinea fowl, sort of way. The next lot all simply disappeared after the parents managed to get half over the other neighbour’s wall, and the Goddess Interfera (that’s me) gathered up the rest and popped them over too.

Once again, a garden full of guineas...

What's left of the first hatch of the year...

Mama hen and her brood (the third hatch)

Then I found about 10 freshly hatched keets in the driveway – no idea where they came from at all – and having opened the back gate, they all trooped through and until yesterday (a few losses aside) have been living in the garden. Three days after their arrival, a hen turned up with several older keets and they joined the other lot for communal guinea rearing, which, I believe, is how it happens in the wild. It was a joy to behold because the Goddess Interfera could sit back and let the blithering fowl get on with it. It’s honestly the first time I’ve seen effective guinea keet rearing – about 12 keets with approsimately 8 adults looking after them. The juvenile sparrowhawk hasn’t really got a look in.

Juvenile black sparrowhawk

He's only five months old...

How do I know? He's ringed and I contacted the bird society... I have his whole history!

It has to be said, if I’ve not made it clear before, guineas are generally useless parents. They stand on babies, lose babies, and abandon babies. Hence, I guess, the strategy of laying about 20 eggs, in the hope that without too much bother or parenting skills one or two will survive. I don’t know about you but it strikes me as highly inefficient.

This last lot of two flocks were doing really well until yesterday when what I can only assume was a rift in the space-time continuum opened up and left the garden bereft of any fowl at all. That’s right, they vanished. POOF! Just like that. It wasn’t like the youngest keets could actually fly (they’d only just started to realise they had wings but didn’t have a clue what to do with them), though they older ones started taking to the trees last week. One minute they were all there, the next, gone. Very disturbing. Couldn’t have been a predator, or we’d have heard the heckling and the parents couldn’t have been trying to get them over the wall, or we’d have heard the peeping. They just disappeared.

And then today, I heard peeping, opened the front gate and in trotted Mama with four keets. I’m guessing the space-time continuum opened, spewed out the chicks, burped and closed, having eaten three others for its supper. That’s the trouble with rifts, they want payment for services rendered. For my own part, I’m convinced it was a rift caused by the Large Hadron Collider as there is no other way those keets could have left the garden.

Still, I suppose stranger things have happened, like me doing this blog post - or maybe I too am in a parallel dimension and this is just… well, who knows…a mirage from within a singularity?

What? Are their pictures? Of course there are pictures… Way too many.