Foul Fowl

Don't, just don't say, "Aw sweet!"

That’s it, I’m done with guinea fowl. I realize given the proliferation of guinea fowl posts over the years that you may not believe me, but it’s true.
Aside from the shredded lawn, the destroyed borders, the quantities of poo and the littering of feathers, we’ve worked out it has cost us the same as a 10 day holiday on a tropical island to keep the beasts content. And for this largesse, what do we get? A lot of dead keets - and savagery.
Yes, savagery.
Enter Rupert the Guinea Fowl.

Rupert the Foul

Rupert has hung out in the garden for the last three years. He arrived as young bird; alone and frightened. Gradually he grew in confidence. He helped out with other guineas keets in the breeding season. He became a stalwart defender of his territory. He took to standing around on the patio table. He demanded, ultimately, his own feeding patch. Oh yes, he grew in stature and confidence.
He tamed a little too – he’d venture close to get a good look at the human who fed him. He’d witter and converse and honestly, as much I was inclined to think of him as Stupid Rupert (because let’s face it, how much brain can there be in that tiny head to manage so much bird), I grew rather fond of him.
But then Rupert found a wife. And then there were keets. 17 of them. All hatched on the last day of the decade.

Papa Rupert and Kids

Having already taken the decision that the Guinea Fowl Inn was closing for business, we were not delighted. Keets don’t flourish in this garden. I suspect years of birds and squirrels has seen a rise of pathogens which wipes them out. So we didn’t encourage them and were delighted when after a day they found the gap between gate and wall and headed into the big wide world.
Sighs of relief all round.

What's that? Is it a berry or a stone? Can we eat it?

"D'ya think there bugs in the cracks, dear?"

Mr and Mrs Rupert, snoozing en famille

But then they came back.
And the bravest one decided on an adventure - an adventure which took him through the tiny hole in the back gate, separating him from his family and resulting in the loudest imaginable peeping. (How so much noise can come from something so small is beyond me.)
Nevertheless, it was Guinea Fowl Goddess to the rescue. For my sins. Which are evidently plentiful.
As I bent down to rescue the small peep, a dark shape leapt on the wall. An angry shape. A shape with wings extended and heckling as though we’d hit the End Times at speed and in a foul mood.
“Bugger off, Rupert,” I snapped, “Don’t be such an arse, I’m trying to help.”
He was having none of it.
He launched himself at me.
Let me assure you there is nothing quite like an enraged guinea fowl coming in for the kill.
He opened his beak and shrieked. He extended his claws and his neck and attacked.
I grabbed a stick to beat him off as he flung himself at me first from the wall, then from the ground, then again from the wall, all the while screaming abominable insults and curses, which I daren’t repeat.
I screamed back, of course. In the interests of decency, I can’t repeat what I said either.
I finally shooed him off, rescued the keet and trotted out to the driveway to return it to its parents.
A thank you?
Not a chance.
Rupert, beside himself with fury, puffed himself up and flew at me again, bellowing obscenities.
I returned them with equal measure, picked up a pebble and flung it at the beast.
“HEEEECK!” screeched Rupert.
I brandished a branch at him and roared.
“SCREE-EECH!” he echoed as he dived over the wall.
“That'll teach you not to bite the hand that feeds you!” I snapped, and called him several unmentionable names.
Rupert and family cleared out the next day.
But guinea fowl have short memories and two days later they were back - and successfully managed to lose three adventuring keets in the back garden.

Three little keets are we...filled to the brim with keetish glee...
(I hope you know your Gilbert and Sullivan.)

After two hours of peeping, I took pity, grabbed the yard broom and set off to the rescue.
Rupert heckled once. I brandished the broom at him.
“Don’t!” I snarled, “Just don’t…even…think…about it!”
He squawked, muttered and vanished over the wall while I herded the keets to the driveway and through the hole in the wall.
Let’s hope that that’s the end of it.
Otherwise I do have a very nice French recipe for guinea fowl stew.

Nap-time with Papa Rupert

Introducing the Supreme Being...

A gathering of guineas

Down at the Guinea Fowl Inn the Goddess Interfera (that’s me) has, I believe, been elevated to the status of Supreme Being. After a long and traumatic summer, it seems I have finally earned my worth.

Wait, let me step back a moment.

My lovely blogging pal, Angela, sent me an email the other day saying that I appeared to have gone AWOL again and didn’t I have any guinea fowl stories to share. Of course there are guinea fowl stories to share – aren’t there always – but the trouble is, for the most part, they’ve been desperately sad. Of the first hatch three survived to the point of being about to get their combs and then disappeared. I’m hoping they are still out there somewhere. Of the second hatch, five have survived, are nearly full size and return to the garden every night to roost in the flowering gums. I reckon they have only been this successful because that doughty old girl, The Duchess, took over and reared them. The Duchess, to be honest, deserves a blogpost of her own, but for now a picture of Her Mightiness will have to suffice.

The Duchess, an old bird, who no longer has her comb. A stout kidnapper and defender of her own clan, an old terror to weaklings and outsiders. And fiercesome "watchdog"...

The third hatch vanished in the middle of the night. Poof! I woke up to hear the adults screeching (something they continued to do for all the next day) but of the keets there was no sign. No bodies, no feathers, nothing. It was like a wormhole had opened in the fabric of the time-space continuum and they’d slipped through. What I suspect more likely though, was that the neighbour’s cat got them. Then we had the fourth hatch – a single hen – who thank goodness was later joined by three other adults – and 17 just-hatched keets (only a few hours old). For two weeks they flourished. Then two died. Then four fell in the pool while I was out and drowned. The other 11 continued nicely for another five days and then, over three days, with the alarm call of the resident guineas going off every night, every one of them disappeared – again, no bodies. We found the last one in the garden, very worse for wear and it died in a few hours later. We figured we had two problems. A pathogen and a predator. And we hoped no more chicks would turn up in the garden as it’s obviously not a good place for them to be.

Ha.

For the past year we’ve had a resident pair of guineas who hung out in the garden by day and roosted in the gums by night - and who were rudely evicted from the garden by the arrival of the Duchess’s clan. So, the poor things laid their eggs on the verge, in the depths of the agapanthus and right outside our gate. Once the eggs hatched, they found their way into the neighbour’s garden, managed to get three keets into our garden (I have no idea how since there is a six foot wall to get over) and then looked at us expectantly. I called the neighbour (I could hear the other keets screaming on the other side of the wall), went round with a box, gathered them all up and brought them home. Well, you know, what else was I supposed to do...

But this was when a new dilemma arose. The garden has been over-foraged, and pretty much denuded of all worm and bug life – and in case you didn’t know although they are omnivorous, guinea fowl eat far more living beasties than they eat seed or grain.

And so it was off to the reptile pet shop on the far side of town to buy mealworms. And it was at this point that my status in the universe changed.

The Charge of the Guinea Brigade

The Goddess Interfera, who is now also The Bearer of Worms, has reached such an elevated status that she gets followed around by eight little guinea keets murmuring “Mee, Mee, Mee, Mee”. They mob me and they flock around my feet in a way which is quite unnatural for a wild creature. If they think there are worms, they will back off for nothing. Not even the black sparrowhawk, sitting high up in the flowering gum will deter them – mostly, I suspect, because they know the Supreme Being will oversee their mealtimes and woe betide anyone who bothers them.

But I think pictures will tell this story far better than words…

Impatience is...

Worm mania!

The Littlest Guinea has snack time...

Ooh, a worm!

Guzzle, stuff, gulp...

And one last swallow.


Now this is how it's done if you're really serious about your worms...

WORMS!!!

Gotcha!

Shake!

Guzzle!


Worm hunters...

Now all stand up tall to make sure the worms go down...

Where've the worms gone? Huh? Huh?

Whaddayamean there no more worms?! *pout*

We want more worms! We want more worms!

And amidst the feeding, lurks the danger...

Worms, eh? I see plump and tasty keets... nom, nom, nom

I'm watching you, Sparrowhawk!

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.

Two-day old guinea keets

Go on then, altogether now - aaaaaawwwww...

Three small peeps

Exploring

Little and Large...

Big cousins and little cousins

Uncle Rupert on the look out for the evil sparrowhawk...

Dinner with Great Uncle Stroppy

Gardening with Guineas...
A word of advice... Don't.

My favourite sequence of shots - Attacking the Evil Leek

Eyeballing the Leek...

Attack - operation one...

Aaaaaargh - pull now, men!!!

That's it, we're winnning...

It's exhausting work, this parenting business...

Zzzzzzzzzz...