Guineas don’t do spring break.  They don’t need a road trip and a beach to wreak havoc when the temperatures start to rise.  They can create chaos just fine at home, thank you.  And they do.

It began in May when their already exploratory nature became practically nomadic.  Instead of 13 guineas roosting comfortably in the barn each night, I began to find only 10.  Or 8.  Or 5!  Occasionally one would stumble in just as I was finishing the evening chores, disheveled, and shaking his head as if to say, “You would not believe what went down underneath the cedar tree today, boys.  You would just not believe.”  Their usually tight knit group broke into ever-changing cliques, the males took to chasing each other, the females, or even a stray hen or two around the barn yard. And I think I  found a few tags scrawled on the backside of the chicken coop.  Although that could have been the rooster stirring the pot a bit.

This behavior resulted, as this type of behavior always does, in disaster.  You can only spend the night huddled under the rose bush, too exhausted from procreational activities to drag yourself home, once or twice before the fox catches on.  Setting up a love nest on the backside of the pond with your latest sweetie is charming, cozy, and right in coyote territory.  Deciding to cross the road in search of new stomping grounds means, well, crossing the road.  The road with logging trucks and soccer moms late for practice going at least 10 miles over the speed limit.  Of course, flying over the perimeter fencing into the neighbor’s yard isn’t a better choice.  The neighbor harbors a shotgun and an extreme hatred of guineas.  I tried telling him that guineas eat ticks.  Deer ticks.  Deer ticks that carry disease.  Deer ticks that carry disease and are dropped by the deer that gather in his yard.  Deer ticks that carry disease and are dropped by the deer that gather in his yard because he actually FEEDS THE DEER.  But just the fact that he actually FEEDS THE DEER tells you what kind of crazed and unreasonable person he is.  I bet he has kinfolk that put out those corn on the cob feeders for squirrels.  Feeding deer and squirrels….I mean, really.  Who does that?

So by the time June rolled around there were only 8 guineas remaining.  Meaning that their frenzied attempts to reproduce had actually resulted in fewer members of the flock instead of more.  Which made me wonder, not for the first time, how in the world guineas managed to live in the wild.  Sometimes it seemed like each guinea’s only plan for survival is to simply hope that there’s someone in the flock dumber than him or herself.  Although, I admit that’s how I got through math in high school.  Too bad there’s no curve in real life as generous as the curve in Mr Greer’s calculus class.

Of course, this all meant I had to step in to preserve my remaining birds and replace the ones I lost.  Around here, it means you have really messed up badly when I have to step in.  Since my own ratio of wins to losses is pretty shaky, my intervention was like going on a talk show to repair a relationship.  Scary, scary stuff.  As soon as the goats saw me surreptitiously gathering guinea eggs from the nests, they knew there was going to be trouble.  Brianna, my herd queen, muttered to her daughter, Magenta, “This kind of behavior is how we ended up with kids being born in December last year when it was 20 degrees outside.”  ”Don’t I know it,”  commiserated Magenta, “Don’t I know it.”  As if it’s such a big deal to make a mistake on the goat gestational calendar.  As if I didn’t pay for that mistake by having to run heat lamps and hair dryers and invest in kidding coats. Jeez.

With guinea eggs stolen and safely tucked into the incubator I started on the second part of my plan.  Hatching my own keets was smart (Plan A), but I’ve learned over the years that having a back-up plan (the infamous Plan B) is even smarter.  Plan B involved locking 4 guineas in the garden and had the huge bonus of letting them patrol the garden for their own food.  Since guineas don’t scratch or eat lots of greens like chickens, this allowed me to have natural and organic bug control (the guineas eating garden pests) while simultaneously maintaining at least 4 members of the flock in a safe and controlled environment.

The bonus-bonus was that I no longer came up from harvesting vegetables covered in little seed ticks. The bonus-bonus-bonus was that if I put in 1 male and 3 females, then I knew any eggs laid would be fertile and at least one hen would be likely to go broody and hatch out some young.  The bonus bonus bonus bonus was having guineas corralled in the garden right next to the house adjacent to our property line that was foreclosed on earlier in the year.  Prospective buyers were sure to hear the guineas’ loud raucous alarm calls when they viewed the property, politely decline to make an offer, and sooner or later the bank would get desperate enough to accept our puny proposal of 1/3 of the house’s asking price.  Pure evil genius.  Mwahahahaha.

Unfortunately, Plan B entailed putting up an 8 foot chain link fence around the garden to keep the guineas in and predators out.  Plus hauling the chicken tractor all the way down the farm drive and clearing a level spot in the garden for it so it could be a guinea house.  Also putting some rivets into shade cloth and driving stakes to hang it in several locations to provide a break from the garden’s full sun.  Never mind spending several nights trying to track down and catch 4 of the remaining guineas when they roosted for the night.  Why is it that a guinea will bed down for 3 consecutive nights under the deck stairs, but as soon as you sneak out to capture him you find him 10 feet up in a pine tree?

That joyful procedure went along with my attempts to definitively determine which guineas were male and which were female so that I could choose 1 male and 3 females for the garden.  Supposedly guinea males have bigger wattles than females.  But when they’re agitated (i.e being chased around the barn yard) all their wattles perfuse with blood making them equally red and enlarged.  Furthermore, guinea males make a one note alarm call while females make a two note call which, according to the literature, sounds like “buck-wheat, buck-wheat.”  Have you ever heard a bird say, “Buck-wheat”?  Yeah, me neither.  And if I did I’d have that talking bird in the circus in a skinny minute and never farm another day in my life.

In the end I managed to catch 4 guineas, clip their wings, toss them in the garden, and just had to let them work out the gender logistics on their own.   What, you thought all those bonuses came without a little sweat equity?  Please, this is a farm.  It doesn’t come with an Easy button.

I soon had evidence that the Fates were on my side, though.  One evening there were only 3 guineas up in the barn yard for dinner.  Frantic that the remaining 4 free ranging guineas had dropped in number, I searched the property.  Lo and behold, I found a female covering what looked like 20 or 30 eggs in a nest in the back pasture.  She had a reasonable position under a pallet and was in an area patrolled by the livestock guardian dog.  As long as the livestock guardian dog didn’t start sneakily eating her eggs (something I suspect happens on occasion to broody poultry but have yet to witness), she had a decent chance of hatching her brood.  I was sure that other guineas would continue to lay eggs under her, resulting in varying hatch times, but that happens so frequently around here that we’ve almost got that madness down to a controlled science.  As long as you use the loose definition of “controlled.”  So with a little help from a determined guinea hen, I now had a Plan C.

Imagine my surprise a few days later when I stopped by the feed mill for my usual check-book-defying feed order and was told by the owner that he was expecting a special delivery in a few weeks.  ”More chicks?”  I asked, knowing that his spring orders had sold very well.  ”Nope,” he said, “Guinea keets.”  Oh, sunny, sunny day.  A Plan D!!  I was confident that at least one of my other plans would work.  But I wouldn’t be ashamed to buy keets from the feed mill.  No, sirree.  Independence and self sufficiency is important in farming.  So is realism.  Besides,  how can we save the economy if we don’t support our small locally owned businesses?  If buying guinea keets is what it takes to keep my flock from dying out and support economic recovery, then buying guinea keets is exactly what I’ll do.  I’m very patriotic that way.  And kind of desperate.  Possibly even out of other options.

It’s hard to say when things started going wrong.

To be continued…