Breeding
It's all about guinea fowl...
I bred some Guinea
fowl this summer, with some success and some mistakes, this is an account
of my experiences.
I have a pair of adult birds, the cock bird is dark grey and pearled,
the hen bird is lavender and also pearled but with some white markings.
The hen bird had been laying regularly on the floor of the henhouse
for a couple of weeks, suddenly we stopped finding eggs and noticed
that she was missing for an hour or so each day. After careful
watching it became apparent that she was flying over the wire fence
and into the next door field, there she had made a nest among the nettles
and was sitting on a large clutch of eggs.
If possible I would have left her to hatch the eggs herself, but unfortunately
living in the country we do have stoats and weasels and also the occasional
fox about, and I thought that the risk was too great both for the eggs
and the mother bird. Guinea fowl are well known for being poor
parents. When the keets hatch the mother walks away and they are
expected to follow, needless to say many don’t make it and Guineas
often lose up to 75% of their brood this way. Keets are rather
soft birds when hatched and will not tolerate damp, if they are on dew
covered grass they can die, so it is important to keep them dry for
the first few days.
I was fortunate enough to be able to borrow a broody hen from a friend
and transferred all the eggs from under the Guinea Fowl to this broody
hen. This was not as simple as it might sound as the mother Guinea
fowl was very protective of her nest and I felt very guilty having to
shoo her off and then take her eggs.
Guinea eggs take longer to hatch than hen eggs, incubation time is 27
or 28 days although they can be 2 or 3 days either side of that.
The broody hen that we had was a super mother and stayed on the eggs
constantly, we had to pick her off once a day for her to feed and drink
but within a few minutes she was back on the nest. I housed her
in an outbuilding that was rat proof and made a nest of hay in a wooden
box. It is very important to prepare the area so that when the
keets hatch they cannot kill themselves. If there is a corner,
they will stand in it and be unable to back out, if they can squeeze
into a crack they will, and they find wire mesh particularly good for
hanging themselves on. To say they have a death wish is an understatement.
After 28 days the keets began to hatch. They need careful watching
at this point as old broken egg shells need removing from the nest,
otherwise they can get wrapped around a whole egg and give it a double
layer, preventing hatching. Guinea fowl eggs are 4 times harder
than hen eggs and only fit, healthy keets will hatch. Once most
of the keets had hatched, Mrs Hen took them out of the nest and showed
them how to find food and water, I had provided chick starter crumb
which both chicks and mother hen were happy to feed on.
At this point I nearly had a disaster. Mother hen was so busy
showing her new young the exciting points of the building and food and
water that she abandoned the remaining eggs which had not yet hatched,
they had already started chipping (a small hole made in the egg shell
by the keets beak) but it can take up to a day for the keet to hatch
from this point. I had to rush the remaining eggs into an incubator
and hatched the other 3 birds off within 5 or 6 hours, I then returned
them to mother hen that night in the dark so that she wouldn’t
reject them.
I was fortunate enough to have a good hatch rate and produced 11 keets
from 12 eggs. This justified my actions of taking the eggs from their
real mother, as she could not have raised that number of young.
It is worth mentioning that keets have delicate legs and must be kept
on a surface with enough texture for them to get a grip, newspaper or
cardboard is too slippery and they will do the splits. Once they
have spraddle legs they will not walk properly again.
