Our New Flock of Guinea Fowl

 We’ve had one lonely male guinea fowl on Our Maker’s Acres Family Farm for quite a while. Our guinea cock was given to us by a friend.  He was in mourning after his mate was killed by a dog.  You see, guinea fowl mate for life.  They are monogamous and mate with no other guineas. He's just been hanging out with our chickens.  We figured that since he lost his “wife,” it was high time that we’d at least give him some friends of his own species, so when we ordered our most recent bunch of pullets, we ordered four guinea fowl day old chicks.

Baby guinea fowl are not called chicks – they are called keets.  I ordered the keets as “straight-run.” That means they aren’t sexed.  It is sort of like a grab bag.  You don’t know whether they are going to be males or females.  I was counting on them being a 50-50 mix, with half being male and half female.  More on that in a minute.  So as they aged, I noticed that they were different.  In fact we now have 3 different breeds of guinea fowl.  One of them turned out to be a Pearl Grey:

Pearl Grey Guinea

One of them is a Lavender:

Lavender Guinea

And two of them are White Africans:

White African Guinea

As you can see in the photo, the breeds are pretty easy to tell apart.  As far as telling the difference between the sexes?  Very hard.  In fact, when I Googled ‘how to tell the difference between male and female guinea fowl,’ I learned that it is virtually impossible to tell by looking at them.  As a side note, it is interesting to see that ten years ago, the word ‘googled’ was not a verb! 

What you have to do is LISTEN to them to tell the difference between the males and females.  Seriously.  So there I was bent over INSIDE the chicken tractor, watching and listening to the noise they make.  Males only speak in one syllable.  They make a “chi-chi-chi-chi” sound.  Females, on the other hand, speak in two syllable sounds.  The female makes a “buck-wheat, buck-wheat” sound.  Now, I know what you are thinking, but I’m not sure if you can make any determination on the relative intelligence level between the sexes or not based on that! (smile).  But amazingly, the female can imitate the male’s chi-chi-chi-chi sound as well.  Crafty and deceptive, she is.

So I had my work cut out for me.  Bent over watching the frightened birds, I watched and listened and watched and listened – and no one would speak.  For the longest time I sat there.  Finally, I heard the buck-wheat, buck-wheat sound coming from the Pearl Grey letting me know that we had at least one female.

I got tired of waiting for the others to talk.  Determining the sex of the remaining three will be a project for another day.  At least we have one female and as a result, we’ll have guinea eggs.  That reminds me of something from my childhood.  On Easter Sunday, we’d “pock” eggs.  A Cajun Tradition, we’d dye hard boiled eggs and tap them together.  The person with the broken egg would be out, while the person with the unbroken egg would progress around the room until a ‘Champion’ holding the hardest egg would be crowned.  My great-grandmother would always bring guinea eggs.  Guinea eggs are smaller than a chicken egg, but they also have harder shells than a chicken egg – making them highly valued come pocking time.

Back to the lonely widower male guinea, he’s been hanging around the chicken tractor interested in his brethren.  I wonder if when it says they “mate for life,” if that means that once their wife dies, they ‘re-marry?”  I guess we’ll find out shortly!