The Determined Broody Hen

 

My hat's off to this old girl.  She is the picture of determination and perseverance.  She's a hen that wants the eggs beneath her to hatch.  When a hen is mature and the days are long, a hen's pituitary gland will release a hormone called prolactin.  She will then sit on eggs.  The motherly instinct is at full throttle.  When you try to remove the eggs from beneath her, she will fluff up her feathers, making herself look larger than she actually is and make a frightening noise.  She'll even peck at your hand with her beak.

To tell you how bad she wants the eggs beneath her to hatch?  Well, I am not exaggerating when I tell you it must be 110 degrees in the henhouse and there she sits all day long.  Chicken eggs hatch in 21 days.  Her hen instincts are guiding her.  She is looking forward to the day when the eggs beneath her hatch and babies arrive.

Why do I keep saying "eggs beneath her?"  They are not her eggs.  They aren't even chicken eggs.  They are guinea fowl eggs.  My neighbor gave me a number of fertilized Lavender Guinea eggs to put under the broody hen.  She accepted them and has been sitting on them for what I figure is 3 weeks.  Unfortunately, I didn't write down the date when I put them underneath her.  

Who knows?  The eggs underneath her may be poached eggs in all this heat.  I'll give her another week setting on them.  If they hatch, however, it'll be neat to see this hen being a surrogate mother to her adopted guinea fowl chicks.  We will check in on her again in the days to come.

What to do with a Broody Hen?

We have a hen in the hen house that is broody.  That means she is in a "motherly way."  She wants to set and hatch out some baby chicks.  Every afternoon when I gather eggs, there she is sitting in the nest.  It's so hot!  I feel sorry for her.  Each day I've been picking her up and collecting eggs and closing up the nesting boxes.  If you don't close them, at night they roost in the boxes and poop in them.  That makes egg collection a mess.  Then you have to clean the eggs which removes the 'bloom' and reduces their shelf life.

When you try to pick her up, she makes agitated noises and fluffs up her feathers.  Lots of animals do this to scare you off and intimidate you.  What to do with a broody hen?  We don't need any more chickens.  I have a number of hens and roosters in the chicken tractor that I'm about to merge in with the flock in the pasture.

Well, my neighbor had an answer for the broody hen.  He has a number of fertilized guinea fowl eggs.  They are lavender guineas.  The eggs should be fertilized.  We'll see if ol' broody girl is going to set on them, hatch them, and raise them as her own.  The day before yesterday, I put all the guinea eggs underneath her while she was setting.  She let me!  Today she got up, but got right back on them once she ate.  Here's all of the guinea eggs:

They are about 3/4 the size of a chicken egg.  I should have counted them, but I didn't.

Guinea eggs have a harder shell than a chicken egg.  When I was growing up, we'd use boiled guinea eggs for pocking.  Pocking eggs is a Cajun French tradition.  On Easter Sunday you "pock" your eggs together to see who has the hardest egg.  My great grandma would always bring them.  I always wondered what "pocking" meant.  Pâques is the French word for Easter.  Maybe that's why?  Pocking is the sound made when hitting two eggs together.  Maybe that's why?  

We will see in a little less than 3 weeks if our broody hen is successful in hatching out some lavender guineas.

Getting Caught Red-Handed

So I got caught red-handed.  Let me explain...

A while back we thought it would be a good idea to get some guinea fowl to raise with the chickens.  I always heard that they were great 'watch-dogs' against snakes. I had good childhood experiences with their eggs and just thought it would be interesting to have a new creature on the homestead.  So I got 4 baby guinea fowl chicks - straight run.  Three were males and one was female.  Although she eventually laid eggs.  She hid her nests very well and by the time we found her eggs, they were old and we were afraid to eat them.  Oh and another thing - guineas are very VERY LOUD!

After a bit, one of the guinea roosters got into a fight with another and was mortally wounded.  Then the female got killed by a predator.  That left us with two males. With no female guinea to show their affections to, they began to terrorize the hens. They were the bullies of the barnyard and gave the hens no peace.

On December 1, 2016 our hens laid their last egg, and they didn't start laying again until mid-February.  Although egg production often wanes in winter months, we had never experienced a complete stoppage of eggs like this.  I first thought that it had to do something with nutrition, so we changed their feed.  Then we thought that perhaps they had parasites.  Nothing we tried seemed to help.

Many times I lovingly refer to my wife as "theory woman."  She is very analytical and has a theory or hypothesis for everything.  She told me that she thought that the persistent bullying by the guineas had contributed to nervous hens and lack of egg production.   I could fix that problem, I told her.  I caught the guineas, killed them, scalded them, plucked them and cut them up.

Although I guess I'll miss their personalities, if they were contributing to the 'egg-drought,' we'll get rid of them.  And that's what we did.

When we butcher fowl, I always like to clean the gizzards as you can see what they've been eating or using to help digest their food.  In the 5 o'clock position in the photo below, you'll see a round, ball-like object.  It is aglow-in-the-dark Air-Soft bullet.  That is kind of odd, but I'm sure the kids shot the air soft bullet into the pasture and the guinea rooster devoured it.

So to test our theory, we were interested to see if egg output increased.  Did it?  The day after the guinea slaughter, a hen laid an egg, the next day another egg, then three, then four, then six eggs, ten eggs and thirteen eggs.  Although correlation doesn't imply causation, it is mighty curious the timing of the increase in egg-laying in conjunction with the guineas' demise  Several factors may by in play, but I don't think it is coincidental.  In another good turn of events, we are enjoying a fresh guinea gumbo right now!

A Knock-down, Drag-out on Our Maker’s Acres Family Farm

Some days are harmonious and joyful, and I feel like Uncle Remus smiling and whistling Zippetty Doo Dah while happy blue birds land on my shoulder and butterflies flutter by under a cartoonish blue sky.  And other days… well, other days are filled with antagonism, fighting, discord, and a cacophony of threats and violence.

Flying Feathers...

Let me explain.  Tuesday of this week I arrived home from work and Tricia met me by the door, telling me that one of the Guinea Fowl males that we just set free was dead!  “What happened?” I said.  “Well, I was feeding all of the chickens and two of the four male guineas got into a heated argument that escalated into a fight.”  The fight resulted in one of the birds being severely injured.  She laid it in the barn and later pronounced the guinea dead.

And then there were three...

Guineas are great watchdogs.  They alert you if a stranger or predator comes around.  They alert you if a snake comes around.  They eat ticks, fleas, mosquitoes, flies, etc. and provide great bug control.  They can fly, so they aren’t as susceptible to predation from hawks or owls as the hapless chickens.  But, every rose, they say, has its thorns. The guinea is also extremely (and I don’t use the word extremely lightly) – they are extremely loud.  LOUD!   Then, the males are extremely aggressive to one another and fight.  Their fights result in death.  That’s a lot of drama out in the pasture that quickly turns pastoral peace in the pasture to brutal bloodshed in the barnyard.

But all is not lost.  In these cases, there’s an important question to ask and so I asked it:  “Tricia, how long has the guinea been dead?” “Oh, about 30 minutes,” she answered.  Perfect!  I put a pot of water to begin scalding and I began sharpening the knives.  I retrieved male guinea that had assumed room temperature and Benjamin and I scalded him, gutted him, and packed him in the freezer!

Guinea on ice... That's nice!

This young guinea fowl will become guinea gumbo.  Some people claim that they are better tasting than chicken.  We aim to find out!

Male Guinea Fowl RIP

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!

New Babies Came in the Mail Today

I ordered some replacement chicks from a hatchery to replace those laying hens that we lose every year to old age or tragedy.  They come from a hatchery over in Cameron, Texas.  I get an email that states, "Your day old chicks have shipped!" and in 48 hours we get a call early in the morning from the Post Office here in town, and they say something like, "You have a package and it's ALIVE!  Come pick it up!"

Tricia heads up to the post office and picks up the fragile package of live baby chicks.  They are chirping and lively.  The night before I got the brooder all set up in the garage with hay lining the bottom, two water containers filled and a heat lamp suspended over it.  As Tricia and Benjamin take each chick out, they dunk their little beaks in the water and they drink like a camel at an oasis!  Then, one by one, they are put in the brooder and a piece of newspaper is put out and chick starter is sprinkled on the newspaper.  Those little dudes/dudettes immediately start pecking and scratching and eating.  By 48 hours since hatching, the contents of the egg they were living on is long gone and they are HUNGRY!

Unboxing the chicks and into the brooder they go

They are bunched up in the bottom left below because that's where the waterers are, but other than that, they are distributed evenly across the brooder, indicating that the temperature is just right.  If they are all piled up on one another, you know it is too cold and you need to lower the heat lamp.

Nice Distribution of birds

So I ordered 25 Barred Rock Pullets.  These are some nice brown egg layers.  In addition to the 25 pullets, I ordered 4 Barred Rock cockerels to take the place of some that died.  There are always roosters warring with one another and they ultimately kill each other.  These must be replaced so that we have fertilized eggs. We like to either let a broody hen sit on a few each year or put a few in our incubator.  Obviously, it's all for naught if the eggs aren't fertilized.

Baby Barred Rock

I also ordered 5 Aracauna or Americauna chicks to add to our little Aracauna family.  These little girls lay beautiful green and blue eggs!  They are a smaller bird and more of a 'wild' creature than the Black Stars, Rhode Island Reds, and Aracaunas roaming on the pasture.

Day old Aracauna chick

Finally I ordered 4 keats!  Keats are baby guinea fowl.  They are the cutest little critters you ever laid eyes on.

Baby Keats!

Here's three of the four keats that Benjamin is holding.  I ordered Straight Run, so hopefully we have two males and two females.

A Handful of Keats

We actually have a male guinea that someone gave us.  Guinea fowl mate for life. This male guinea's mate got killed and he went into mourning and some friends gave him to us.  Maybe one of these little keats will grow up and befriend him, who knows.  He needs some friends.  He flies high into the top of a tree each night to roost - all by himself.  

Our Lonely Male Guinea

A couple of things about guineas - they lay small eggs that are good for eating. Guineas make a good gumbo.  The guinea eggs are hard and are great for pocking. You can READ HERE to learn about pocking eggs.  My great grandmother would bring us guinea eggs for pocking each year when we were kids.  

The other thing about guineas is that they are great 'watchdogs' for snakes.  They will gather around a snake, pecking at it and make a lot of noise!  They also do a great job in eradicating bugs - even better than chickens.  So it is good to have some of these around the homestead.  It'll be fun watching the keats grow!  They all seem really healthy and full of vigor and energy, running around the brooder.

Boisterous babies in the brooder

Baby chicks are just so much fun.  Benjamin enjoys watching them run around and play.  He could just stand there for a long time and watch them.

Keeping a close eye on the new babies

It's always fun when baby chicks come in the mail - way more entertaining than anything on television...