Brooding

It's all about guinea fowl...

The advantage of using a broody hen is that she takes care of keeping the chicks warm, teaching them how to scratch for food and warning them if they are in danger.

I did hatch a second batch using an incubator, as a broody hen was not available. The hatch rate was still good (11 out of 13), however I had to spend much more time watching the keets and checking the temperature as they were brought up under a heat lamp. These birds needed a helping hand as they did not have a mother and I had to show them where the food was and dip their beaks in the water so they knew where to find a drink.

If you are going to use an incubator, keep the humidity low.  I lost a whole batch due to a change in the weather and a spell of high humidity.

I kept the incubator temperature at about 102 degrees Fahrenheit.  Once the keets were hatched, I set the heat lamp up so that it was about 9 inches from the floor and the temperature at floor level was 95 degrees. Every week I raised the lamp a few inches to decrease the temperature by about 5 degrees a week until 6 weeks when they didn’t need heat anymore.

After 2 weeks I put the 11 keets with mother hen out on to grass, they had a run with a house at one end so they could be enclosed for the night. The incubator keets had to stay inside for much longer as they needed the heat lamp.

After 6 weeks I changed the food from chick crumb onto growers pellets, these have the right balance of ingredients to help the birds from 6 weeks up to about 20 weeks.  I used growers with built in medication against disease, but you don’t have to.

The two batches produced differently marked birds. The first batch produced 8 lavender and 3 greys, the second batch was 5 lavender and 6 pearled grey.

Once the birds were well grown, I decided which ones I would keep and sold the rest.  I have kept 4 hens and one cock which all run around together as a flock. They are quite tame and have now joined the hens and sleep in the hen house.  Occasionally if disturbed at dusk they will fly up a tree or even onto a roof, in which case I leave them there as they are quite safe off the ground.

If when looking at the gallery you wonder what the yellow and black chicks are, they are bantams which were kindly given to me as hatching eggs and put under the hen with the Guinea eggs. By starting them one week later than the Guinea eggs, they all hatched at the same time.