Do you name your guineas

[Jabebee13]

White guinea - Snowy? 2. Starlight. 3. Male - II Premiere ii, Miss It Er, Miss Lovely, Miss Wooly, Lana (italian for wool), Miss Feathery, 9. Sequin 10. Shiny 11. Unnamed. White guineas. And Jennifer and Cutie are grey guineas. Brown as babies. They change feathers. . Naturally. What process is this called... Not exactly molting is it? Pictures in 4 days from now. Sorry. They don't live with me right now. I'm not living with the flock.

 

[Mixed flock enthusiast]

White guinea - Snowy? 2. Starlight. 3. Male - II Premiere ii, Miss It Er, Miss Lovely, Miss Wooly, Lana (italian for wool), Miss Feathery, 9. Sequin 10. Shiny 11. Unnamed. White guineas. And Jennifer and Cutie are grey guineas. Brown as babies. They change feathers. . Naturally. What process is this called... Not exactly molting is it? Pictures in 4 days from now. Sorry. They don't live with me right now. I'm not living with the flock.

Yes! That’s part of why I like to have a variety of colors in my guineas. I need to update this, but here’s a kind of genealogy chart with names...

 

[southwind00]

@southwind00 although white millet is definitely a favorite treat of guineas, there is no reason to feed that exclusively. I feed my adult guineas a 20% protein all flock pellet. It cost $15/50lb. All my chickens get this also so I only need to buy one kind of feed. Both the guineas and chickens are offered free choice oyster shell. Feed the all flcok regularly, and use the white millet as a high value treat! Just my .02 cents.

Now there's an assumption! I feed Nutena gamebird/turkey grower right now with 21%protien and probably will till spring then back off the protein a little when all my guineas are adults. Guineas is all I have. Millet is one of their treats so every late afternoon they are in their coop waiting for their treat. It makes my guinea life easy.

 

[R2elk]

Now there's an assumption! I feed Nutrena gamebird/turkey grower right now with 21% protein and probably will till spring then back off the protein a little when all my guineas are adults. Guineas is all I have. Millet is one of their treats so every late afternoon they are in their coop waiting for their treat. It makes my guinea life easy.

I don't feed treats. Most evenings when I go to shut the guineas in for the night, they are all in the coop with a lookout watching for me. As soon as they see me, they come running out of the coop and wait for me to get my stick. I start tapping the stick on the ground and they run right back in the coop.

If for some reason, I am late, they will all be on their roosts and do not come rushing back out.

 

[Sydney65]

Never name something you plan to eat. There's nothing quite as terrifying to a child as opening a freezer seeing packages labeled "Blackie" (true story).
On the otherhand, we don't gave ours to eat, so everyone has a name.

 

[southwind00]

I don’t have plans to eat my guineas. Though, if one dies from breeding time violence again I think I might try it. I feel bad about the one that died this year, we didn’t eat it so I feel it was a waste.

I have named a few guineas and other poultry. Names happen when particular ones stand out. I don’t go out of my way to name them.

I agree with @My2butterflies ,if they stand out they get a name, like my white female that was the only egg that hatched out of eight I bought off Ebay, hence her name is Ebay and a few others with stories so they get names. My 10 young adults(4 guinea brooded and 6 garage brooded) are all very similarly pied and naming would be very confusing. Guinea are a taste treat for sure and I had planned on culling a few to get my ratio correct but I'm at 8 hens and 7 cocks which I feel is pretty good and i don't want to mess that up. But having just bought a 50# bag of white millet and shocked by the price rise $20 to $37 (anybody else get that) , I may change my tune

 

[My2butterflies]

I feed Nutena gamebird/turkey grower right now with 21%protien and probably will till spring then back off the protein a little when all my guineas are adults.

That is my plan too. Since over half of my flock are juveniles I didn’t want to switch to all flock just yet.
We also give cracked corn and meal worms as treats. Not a lot or daily, but now and then I cave to their bagging.

 

[Mixed flock enthusiast]

I agree with @My2butterflies ,if they stand out they get a name, like my white female that was the only egg that hatched out of eight I bought off Ebay, hence her name is Ebay and a few others with stories so they get names. My 10 young adults(4 guinea brooded and 6 garage brooded) are all very similarly pied and naming would be very confusing. Guinea are a taste treat for sure and I had planned on culling a few to get my ratio correct but I'm at 8 hens and 7 cocks which I feel is pretty good and i don't want to mess that up. But having just bought a 50# bag of white millet and shocked by the price rise $20 to $37 (anybody else get that) , I may change my tune

We go through a lot of millet and sunflower seeds and... well lots more, for my husband’s obsession with feeding wild birds. The guineas get a little bit at bed time, about half the time, so kind of a drop in the bucket. I didn’t know that the price had gone up so much!
edited to add: I ended up adding too many Pearl grey and pied Pearl grey this year! We now have 4 Pearl grey females and 2 Pearl gray males. I can still find my two oldest Pearl grey hens, but can’t tell the rest apart right now. We also added one male and one female pied Pearl grey, and I’m struggling to tell them apart from my older two pied PG hens too!

 

[Mixed flock enthusiast]

We don't eat our poultry, and my kids make sure they all have names, even if they're impossible to tell apart. But right now we only have four guineas: Snapper, Annabeth, Huckleberry, and Kitty, so we know who's who.

Sometimes the kids try to change their names, but I can never wrap my head around the new ones. I think they might be calling Annabeth "Blossom" now, but she's always Annabeth to me.

I have a tendency to give two names, the one my daughter and I agreed upon, and then the one that comes to me later out of nowhere... I have Ghost-Thorn, Victor-Junior, HalfNHalf-Doublemint, Lacewing-Buckbeak, etc. Drives my daughter nuts, so then when I talk with her about the birds, I have to work from the name I now know them by back to their original name.. .

 

[Mixed flock enthusiast]

How do you guys know your guineas apart? I can only tell my lavender guineas from the pearl grays. I used to name them when I only had like 5 but now with 15+ I can't keep track of them lol.

It helps a lot if the guineas are different colors. For pied birds, I look at their pattern and any shapes I see. Telling apart Pearl greys is particularly hard for me! I currently have five and can still find my older girls, but the new girls and boys are tough. They are young yet, so I’m hoping casque size and shape will eventually help there.

After color, I look at their casque size and shape. Some of mine look like a sharks fin (Welsh, Pearl, Victor), some more like an upright triangle (Viceroy), a pointy thorn (Ghost), or a cartoon bump on the head (Bruiser).