My flock of guinea-fowls

In the early summer, a neighbour brought some baby guineas to us to keep in the incubator with our baby chicks. They were 30 of them. We raise them and the neighbour did not want them anymore because they have some white in their feathers. What do we do with 30 of those critters?. We lost a few, one was accidently killed by Roo, who thought that it was a quail. Roo can catch a quail in the air. When reprimanded and told that the guineas are her birds, she no longer bother with them. One was killed by Max who wanted to play with the baby guinea. He was told that he no longer can play toss and catch with 'his' birds. Nowadays, he only scares them to induce them to fly overhead while he chases them. We lost another 2 to the black garden snake. Then we had about 26 of them with one very sickly and ignored by the rest of the flock.

Guineas are an intelligent birds and they belong to the same family as the peacock family. They make similar sound or noises. They get excited rather easily and make a lot of noise. people say they are good 'guards' as they will shriek at anything they see which is not familair to them. They roam everywhere and they even go out of our 20 acres yard. However, they do come back in the evening to roost in their pen. One day they came back without the sickly one. I went around calling for 'nini..nini'. I was sad because i was sure that 'something' must have got it. There are a lot of predators around too. They would be safe in the yard, but when they roam around the neighbourhood, they are exposed to the elements.

One morning, the new neighbour south of us, came and told us that our 'ninis' have been visiting her yard and her son's yard. She said that she has dogs and her dogs might kill our 'ninis' if they keep going into her yard. My 'ninis' are not scared of our dogs as they are used to them. They even lay down next to Max or Dumdum to sun bathe. However, I suspected, my neighbour's dog must have got the 'sickly' nini that tag along the main group.

I did not realise that my ninis roam far and wide. they visit other neighbours too. They even brought home one afternoon, a very handsome peacock. Since then, the peacock keeps coming into our yard to visit and walk around with my ninis. If the peacock does not turn up in the morning, my ninis will fly over our 10 ft fence to go visit and bring back the peacock.

Oh..I now only have 6 ninis. I sold 8 of them to a friend at $8 each. Another 10 to a farmer down the road. By keeping only 6 of them, I could at least contain them in the yard. However, they still fly over the fence to visit the peacock and bring him home. Such friendship I could never fathom. Probably the peacock is lonely since I have never seen a peahen with him. As long as they know the way home before feeding time, i am ok with their disappearing act.