SamLockwood
Songster
- Sep 29, 2022
- 269
- 567
- 156
As a few of you know, I have a mixed flock of free-ranging chickens and guinea fowl. Most of them were newly acquired late last August and I raised them together. Depending on who you ask this is either the greatest idea in the world or the worst (there does't really seem to be any middle ground).
As someone who never free-ranged birds before and never had any experience with guinea fowl, I will say the overall experience the last 7 months or so has been rather interesting to say the least.
Today, I'm going to talk about how this crowd has decided they like to lay their eggs. When I had the coops built there was a bit of a miscommunication with the carpenter and the larger coop has only four nesting boxes but they're quite a bit wider than the three in the small coop. I ended up letting it stand because the guidlines say 1 box per 4 layers and 7 should be enough for less than 2 dozen laying birds. Plus all the information I saw was the guineas would laying in random locations outside anyway.
Now, for the purposes of this description I'll number the boxes in the smaller coop 1 to 3, and the oversized boxes in the big coop 4 through 7.
The new chickens started laying early (not long after the arctic blast in January), and really kicked into high gear by late February. The guineas started later, about early March. Initially there were pretty random: the first looked like she just sat down in the back yard. I'd find others sometime underneath the stairs from the back deck, other times in the old, mostly disassembled coop and run (the old run has now become a popular dust-bathing spot). Still other times I'd find one or two in the edge of the woods near the yard.
Favorite nesting boxes for the chickens are 1, 2, and 4. 3 and 5 see less frequent use. Up until this week nobody used 8, and nobody to date has used nesting box 7.
After a while, the guineas seemed to figure out the chickens were going into the nesting boxes to lay their eggs. I wanted to hatch some this year, so I started collecting these and carefully removing the eggs so as not to empty the boxes out. All the online advice says not to ever clean out a clutch of guinea eggs as they'll abandon that spot and find a new location to lay eggs.
The guineas largely follow the chickens around: using the same boxes as the chickens. Sometimes, especially the bigger boxes 4-7, they'll actually crawl into a box with a chicken and lay eggs side-by side. The chickens do this with each other, but far less frequently.
At this time (early a month ago), the guineas seemed to favor boxes 4 & 5, so I let some eggs build up in there and then collected the lot (19 eggs) to put in the incubator (only about 5 developed out of this lot).
I thought that would be it for the guineas using boxes 4 & 5, but this was not the case. They'd either lay where they found chicken eggs or use a box even though it was cleared out the day before.
Within a few days of my putting the guinea eggs in the incubator, two of the new chickens went severely broody. Curiously, they staked out nesting boxes 1 & 2. So I decided to take only chicken eggs out from under them and leave the guinea eggs.
After about 10 days of buildup, which resulted in each chicken trying to sit on a clutch of 16-20 eggs each, I candled the eggs and kept the ones that had development (roughly half). Out of the discards (18) roughly half were clearly rotten and the others might have simply been too new.
The last few weeks, the guineas pretty routinely lay in the nesting boxes, and now it's the chickens (mainly the cream legbars) that send me on easter egg hunts. Two weeks ago I came home relatively late (about a hour after dark) and missed one of the smaller legbars when I did the head-count before locking them down for the night.
I spent over a half hour tramping around the 5 acres of fenced in land the flock free-ranges in, trying to find a sign of the predator attack that took my hen and found nothing. Shining my flashlight somewhat randomly around the yard I thought to myself: "Is that a tail I see over there?" and walked towards the old coop / run.
Where the roof of the old coop had overshadowed the old run was a triangular enclosure, and this relatively small pullet was in the middle of this large nest of pine-needles she constructed on top of the chicken wire and she was trying to sit on top of this clutch of 19 blue eggs. She was sort of leaned forward with her wings half-spread in her unsuccessful attempt to warm a clutch of eggs about 50% larger than her body. I dislodged her, herded her into the coop, and collected her stash.
The second installment of "Secret Legbar Egg Stash" was a couple of days ago, when I heard some outrage "Bgok-ing" coming from the back yard, and when I went onto the deck to investigate I see a Legbar emerge from one of the cages piled up next to the old coop. I'm not sure what upset her but in the pine-straw laden floor of that cage was a clutch of 15 blue eggs.
So there you have it: guinea fowl that use nesting boxes like chickens, and chickens that leave large stashes of eggs in weird places like guinea fowl. Just two of the strange behaviors I've observed with this flock.
As someone who never free-ranged birds before and never had any experience with guinea fowl, I will say the overall experience the last 7 months or so has been rather interesting to say the least.
Today, I'm going to talk about how this crowd has decided they like to lay their eggs. When I had the coops built there was a bit of a miscommunication with the carpenter and the larger coop has only four nesting boxes but they're quite a bit wider than the three in the small coop. I ended up letting it stand because the guidlines say 1 box per 4 layers and 7 should be enough for less than 2 dozen laying birds. Plus all the information I saw was the guineas would laying in random locations outside anyway.
Now, for the purposes of this description I'll number the boxes in the smaller coop 1 to 3, and the oversized boxes in the big coop 4 through 7.
The new chickens started laying early (not long after the arctic blast in January), and really kicked into high gear by late February. The guineas started later, about early March. Initially there were pretty random: the first looked like she just sat down in the back yard. I'd find others sometime underneath the stairs from the back deck, other times in the old, mostly disassembled coop and run (the old run has now become a popular dust-bathing spot). Still other times I'd find one or two in the edge of the woods near the yard.
Favorite nesting boxes for the chickens are 1, 2, and 4. 3 and 5 see less frequent use. Up until this week nobody used 8, and nobody to date has used nesting box 7.
After a while, the guineas seemed to figure out the chickens were going into the nesting boxes to lay their eggs. I wanted to hatch some this year, so I started collecting these and carefully removing the eggs so as not to empty the boxes out. All the online advice says not to ever clean out a clutch of guinea eggs as they'll abandon that spot and find a new location to lay eggs.
The guineas largely follow the chickens around: using the same boxes as the chickens. Sometimes, especially the bigger boxes 4-7, they'll actually crawl into a box with a chicken and lay eggs side-by side. The chickens do this with each other, but far less frequently.
At this time (early a month ago), the guineas seemed to favor boxes 4 & 5, so I let some eggs build up in there and then collected the lot (19 eggs) to put in the incubator (only about 5 developed out of this lot).
I thought that would be it for the guineas using boxes 4 & 5, but this was not the case. They'd either lay where they found chicken eggs or use a box even though it was cleared out the day before.
Within a few days of my putting the guinea eggs in the incubator, two of the new chickens went severely broody. Curiously, they staked out nesting boxes 1 & 2. So I decided to take only chicken eggs out from under them and leave the guinea eggs.
After about 10 days of buildup, which resulted in each chicken trying to sit on a clutch of 16-20 eggs each, I candled the eggs and kept the ones that had development (roughly half). Out of the discards (18) roughly half were clearly rotten and the others might have simply been too new.
The last few weeks, the guineas pretty routinely lay in the nesting boxes, and now it's the chickens (mainly the cream legbars) that send me on easter egg hunts. Two weeks ago I came home relatively late (about a hour after dark) and missed one of the smaller legbars when I did the head-count before locking them down for the night.
I spent over a half hour tramping around the 5 acres of fenced in land the flock free-ranges in, trying to find a sign of the predator attack that took my hen and found nothing. Shining my flashlight somewhat randomly around the yard I thought to myself: "Is that a tail I see over there?" and walked towards the old coop / run.
Where the roof of the old coop had overshadowed the old run was a triangular enclosure, and this relatively small pullet was in the middle of this large nest of pine-needles she constructed on top of the chicken wire and she was trying to sit on top of this clutch of 19 blue eggs. She was sort of leaned forward with her wings half-spread in her unsuccessful attempt to warm a clutch of eggs about 50% larger than her body. I dislodged her, herded her into the coop, and collected her stash.
The second installment of "Secret Legbar Egg Stash" was a couple of days ago, when I heard some outrage "Bgok-ing" coming from the back yard, and when I went onto the deck to investigate I see a Legbar emerge from one of the cages piled up next to the old coop. I'm not sure what upset her but in the pine-straw laden floor of that cage was a clutch of 15 blue eggs.
So there you have it: guinea fowl that use nesting boxes like chickens, and chickens that leave large stashes of eggs in weird places like guinea fowl. Just two of the strange behaviors I've observed with this flock.
