Tag Archives: guinea fowl

Guinea Fowl Rescue

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My grandfather kept poultry, my earliest memories are of my father working for Thornbers Hatchery around 1959-61 (he had a red Austin A35 van) and when I started work, after years of working round poultry in school holidays, I went to work on a poultry breeding farm under a man who had been on the staff of Wye College in the 1930s.

What I’m getting round to telling you is that I have an “old school” approach to keeping animals.

When we were collecting eggs this morning one of the group noticed that we had a guinea fowl with a foot problem. A big ball of much had gathered under one of its feet and was causing a limp. Normally these gather on the toes. It’s caused by walking around on wet surfaces and when you let the birds wander, like out guinea fowl (which are as hard as peacocks to keep from wandering), it will happen.

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As I say, normally these balls of muck gather on the toes. They are made up of mud, straw wood shavings and what I will refer to as “other substances”.

The old school cure is to hit them with a hammer or (because this is a farm and we never use tools properly) a big spanner. If the ball is held against a hard surface and tapped with repeated gentle knocks, the ball will usually crumble away. It sounds a bit drastic but the bird is normally happy to watch and shows no signs of distress. Compared to pulling, cutting or soaking, it is quick, efficient and pain free. It just sounds drastic.

The cause of the problem for the guinea fowl today was that it had gathered a piece of binder twine around its middle toe and the trailing end had allowed the ball to form, so after breaking up the ball we had to cut the twine and unwind it.

This had cut into the toe and looked quite sore.

Unfortunately you can’t completely guard against bits of binder twine, but you do need to remain vigilant when keeping poultry.

As I’ve said before – never a dull moment!

 

 

 

 

Wednesday

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A busy day today. Amongst other things, we got a decent bird count under our belts with a buzzard and a picture of long-tailed tits on the fat balls. I’ll write that up tomorrow.

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We also had a birthday party (with cake), wrote a few lines on each of our sausage varieties (I’m well on my way to becoming the Sausage Laureate), wrote a couple of emails relating to the rebuilding of Number Two son’s knee, did the admin and did the cleaning ready for the yoga group and kitchen visitors tomorrow. I’m good at cleaning, a fact that infuriates my wife, who thinks I ought to do it at home too. As if…

Finally I had to look up recipes for guinea fowl. There’s probably no easy way of breaking this to you, but there aren’t as many guinea fowl as there used to be in the barn. I like them, I even admire their indomitable spirit, but when it comes down to it I’ll eat pretty much anything apart from people and beetroot. I never have liked beetroot.

 

Busy week

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Sorry – been a bit busy this week.

Main news of the last few days is that, as prophesied, the guinea fowl fought back – they found a loose flap at the back of the coop and half a dozen made a brak for freedom. The rest stayed next to the food hopper: frankly I’m beginning to lose faith in them. I had hoped for more.

Julia took the Wednesday group out for a walk to practice for the Big Farm Bird Count. They had a great view of a buzzard quartering it’s hunting ground, and heard the mewing cries distinctly.

And finally, 4,000 sausages arrived. Have you any idea how long it takes to weigh, bag and label 4,000 sausage of seven varieties? I do.

Twenty six hours.

Not all in one go, of course, and not all by myself. Two of us did it and we spread it over two days.

When I close my eyes all I can see are sausages…

 

Where the smart money goes…

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The guineafowl are living on borrowed time. They’ve been accused of scratching up garden plants and making too much noise so, it seems, they have to go. No more biodiversity, no more permaculture, just an empty, lifeless farm.

There is a bright spot of course. In a battle of wits between birds and farm staff all is not as it may seem. Having observed the staff in action or the years (or should that be staff inaction?) I’m not anticipating an early close to the matter.

Having discussed this with several people the smart money is on the birds.

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Having said that, after a week of skirmishing, I turned up this morning to find the farm was winning, with most of the birds penned in the barn. There was just one still at liberty, and it was on top of the barn crowing for all it was worth. It’s a numerical advantage to the farm but the noise and propaganda victory goes to the birds.

Seeing as the pigs and chickens escape on a regular basis I’m waiting to see if this is the final act or not…

Students again

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We were greeted by the increasing guineafowl flock this morning, including the whites and the lavenders. They all seem to have left the shelter of the poultry field and be roaming round as a 30 strong pack making permanant alarm calls. We’ve now had several complaints from the farmer’s mum so Something Must Be Done. Just before lunch he reminded the lads they needed to catch a dozen to send to market with the pigs tomorrow.

You know what?

I can still hear them but I can’t see a single one of them. I know they can’t understand us so there must have been something in the body language that alerted them. Smart birds, guineafowl.

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Apprentices 0 Guineafowl 1.

There’s a good coating of ice today and the group of students we have visiting find the first job of the day is breaking ice on the outside water troughs. I think it’s the first time that many of them have experienced the idea that water can’t be guaranteed. It’s more of a shock than the cold. To be fair to them they have all brought the right clothes for the day (unlike the Monday course) so the cold isn’t that bad. There is, as we always say, no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing.

We won a prize for championing farming as a career two years ago. Not sure the weather is helping us today.

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I’m currently wearing a short-sleeved shirt despite the ice, and I’m trying to look like I’m enjoying it. That’s what happens when you have several black and white checked shirts, middle-aged eyes and get dressed in the half-light without turning the lights on.

We treated ourselves to an extra hour in bed because we’ve been waking each other up with the coughs that refuse to go. That meant we had to rush out with no breakfast though we did find time to stop and buy some to eat in the car. You always do, don’t you?

That’s the 21st century – rush, profligate spending on poor nutrition and a general feeling that I could do better. I’ll have to do better on Monday – it’s National Breakfast Week! OF course, in line with modern marketing techniques it’s know as Shake up your Wake up!. It doesn’t even make sense. Grumble, grumble…better in my day…

On the positive side we saw goldcrests in the conifers by the chicken field yesterday. They are surprisingly common according to the figures but you don’t often see one. Normally you hear the high-pitched squeak they make but, likethe somg of the skylark the ability to hear goldcrests declines with age. I haven’t heard a skylark for ages, or a bat for 30 years,  and am now worried I may have reached the age where I can’t hear goldcrests.

However, it could just be that the skylark is down to a tenth of the population it had 30 years ago. That’s probably sadder than my toughts of deafness. And to round off with a strange coincidence – I’ve just had an email on my phone “Alzheimer’s Disease is now following you on Twitter”.

Not sure what to make of that.

😉

 

 

Hectic Day

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It’s a windy day and the first thing we had to do on arrival was put chickens back in one of the coops where the top had blown off. One had managed to get 200 yards away. Then we had to drive the guinea fowl of of a neighbour’s garden where they had taken shelter from the wind – not everyone likes guinea fowl as much as I do.

They are currently hidden out of the wind somewhere in the trees behind the pizza oven. That’s not the best place for them because the trees are meant to conceal us from the man across the road who keeps complaining about the noise. Twenty guinea fowl calling and a howling wind will not be improving his day, or his thoughts about the farm.

After that it was time for a cup of tea, taken in a miserably cold centre. I suspect someone left the doors open this morning because thelights were on and the temperature was only 4 degrees higher than outside (14 degrees C compared to 10 outside). Normally you’d expect 18 – 20 degrees, which is a good temperature to work in. We used the boost, and the fan heater, but it took four hours to get up to 18 degrees.

The insulation is so good that although we have now had the extra heating off for three hours the temperature is holding, despite the outside temperature dropping. That is despite us opening the door around a dozen times – as long as you are quick about it there is no significant loss. In colder parts we’d have to have better arrangements but it’s OK for an English winter.

Strange as it sounds we were warmer in the barn wire-brushing an old fertiliser spreader we have been given. It’s going to make a grand centre-piece for the entrance. Current plans include flowers and a sheep sculpture. If you say it quickly it doesn’t seem difficult. If you say it slowly the flowers don’t sound difficult, but I’m not so sure about the sheep sculpture. We saw some great ones when we were in the Lake District in autumn, but most of them were inside. The only one I recall seeing outside was made by putting pieces of stone together, but we don’t have much stone round here. We have bricks and wood and willow.

I can’t see bricks being successful, though they do make a superb train in Darlington (admittedly one that doesn’t use many curves) and my attempts at a wooden reindeer were unimpressive so it looks like we will need to source some willow. On the other hand, I’ve just looked up “brick sculpture” and find myself thinking of LEGO…

 

 

Back to normal

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It’s the first day with the big group all back and everyone is comparing Christmas presents and illnesses. Chest infections have been popular over Christmas (and continue to be popular as an excuse for not working outside!) and new phones seem to have been popular presents.

My phone is now over a year old and is seen as a positive antique. If it hadn’t been for the unfortunate conjunction of phone and cup of tea I’d still be using a four-year-old phone. It had survived being dropped in the washing up water but the tea was a step too far. If I’d been having a virtuous day it would have been OK but I’d backslid and put sugar in it, and phones don’t cope well with sticky stuff. An ancient phone isn’t a problem to me, I’m still old-fashioned enough to see a telephone as a communicatiion device instead of a platform for games and music and searching the internet.

We’re waiting for lambing at the moment and had a couple of goes at moving sheep. They didn’t work well, as sheep despite their reputation for following the leader, don’t like to walk across muddy ground. The driving of ducks and geese went better, but mud isn’t really an issue for them, and as dusk came they made tracks for the barn with a minimum of drama.

Meanwhile the guineafowl have been invading gardens again, so all is well and truly back to normal.

I really must remmeber to start using the camera again…

 

Worm community hit by hurricane!

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Looks like I might have been a bit hasty in my assessment of the hurricane damage. This morning I found the lid of the wormery had blown off. I only check them every few days as they don’t need a lot of looking after. They are in a sheltered place and it didn’t occur to me that anything could have happened, but it looks like a swirling gust had got under the lid.

Fortunately there was a good layer of damp paper on top of them to keep things dark and they don’t seem to have been inconvenienced too much. Things seemed a bit wet so I suspect they have been rained on but I have arranged some more paper to help them dry out. I’ll add some bread crumbs tonight to help them along.

It looks like they have been breeding well as there are hundreds of small worms on the surface. However, I will check this out just to be sure they aren’t something horrible.It would be just my luck to be boasting about the fecundity of my worms just as they were being eaten by parasites. I’ve kept various livestock over the years and worms, though they don’t need daily attention, are still proving hard to get the hang of. No matter what the books tell me about them being easy I just can’t bring myself to believe it.

On the farm the guinea fowl are refusing to cooperate and move back to the vegetable garden. They are well and truly back with the rest of the poultry and refusing to move from the food. Can’t say I blame them. Even with a coat of waterproof feathers the weather is pretty bad at the moment. (Please note that I could have done the foul/fowl weather joke there but I chose not to. I am better than that.)

There is still a bit of jostling going on with the group of guinea fowl that live with the chickens full time but they seem to be settling down. Even when the weather improves I have a feeling that the poultry field will be a regular stop on the farm circuit for the free range group – bugs are fine but you can’t beat a hopper full of grain.

 

I’ve been thinking of what to write as a first post about Green Care for several months now, Finally I’ve come to the conclusion that no matter what I do it isn’t going to be as good as I want it to be, but at least I managed a key word in the first sentence, which is what I’m supposed to do.

That may be the last time I do anything because I’m supposed to do it. In a life characterised by drifting it might be asking too much of a blog if I expect it to correct my character flaws as well as publicise Quercus Community.

It’s also slightly misleading because I probably won’t be writing much about Green Care, just about a series of events that occur as I drift through life supposedly assisting my wife. She’s the one who set the Quercus project up with a friend and she’s the one with the sense of purpose and the crusading spirit. Today, for instance, I have been baking quiche (using ready-made pastry cases), looking at the World Porridge Day website, thinking about writing press releases and sorting out paperwork. Pleasant as they may be, I can’t see porridge or quiche changing the world. Nor can I see much paperwork being done.

Meanwhile my wife and her co-director have been outside in the cold and rain with our usual Wednesday group engaging in horticultural therapy and using the Green Gym. In everyday English that’s “gardening”.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a picture. It’s our guinea fowl doing what guinea fowl do best – loafing about in a big group, Just like teenagers with feathers. They’ve had a busy day so far, looking for bugs, taunting the sick turkeys in the hospital pen and dodging showers. In this picture they are sheltering under a table. Every other bird in the county is in a hedge, but ours are sheltering under a picnic table.

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However, they do eat a lot of pests and according to most websites they don’t damage plants. My experience is that they did shred a courgette by roosting on it as it grew at the top of a tyre stack. And they probably did pull a neighbour’s onion sets up. They were certainly in the area, though it could have been anyone. But as I say, they do eat a lot of pests, and they do deposit a fair amount of manure so I can live with that.

Or as Bill Mollison the permaculture man put it:

You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency!