OliverAndCo
In the Brooder
- Jul 19, 2023
- 6
- 3
- 11
Our flock stats:
First time guinea owners
Started with 13 keets last July, and are currently down to 10 adults due to predators
Not sure how many males vs females but there’s at least a few of each I’d say
Sleep in coop at night, ~9’x12’ with 16+ ft of roosting space between 2 beams.
Free range during the day
There is one smaller male (I believe) who is at the bottom of the pecking order, and there is 1 bigger male that has taken to especially bullying it the last week. He guards the coop door and prevents it getting in at night, chases it in laps around the yard, and chases it up into trees from branch to branch trying to get to it. His main behavior is pecking at his back and pulling out a feather or 2. When we force the runt into the coop at night, it immediately gets cornered until it flies up higher to one of the roosts to escape. The runt seems to have recently started challenging it back occasionally.
Do we need to intervene? We see a few options:
1. Let nature take its course, if the runt can’t get in at night, it’ll roost in the tree and eventually get eaten by something. Will this just cause the bully to find a new target? Which leads to option…
2. Cull the bully - or will another bully just take its place?
3. They’ve just started mating and laying eggs in the last week or 2, so is this just extra aggression from breeding season that will settle over time?
I know our flock can’t get much smaller without running into more aggression issues, so I’m trying to figure out a solution that causes the least loss of life.
I’m not sure that we want to add any more because they consume so much of our time already, and even if we did, they’d been too young to add to the flock for quite some time, so I’m not sure it would help anyway?
Thank you for reading my long question! We just aren’t sure what we should do. And we have a week-long trip coming up, so if we could get something figured out by the time we leave so they don’t all die while we’re gone, that would be ideal
First time guinea owners
Started with 13 keets last July, and are currently down to 10 adults due to predators
Not sure how many males vs females but there’s at least a few of each I’d say
Sleep in coop at night, ~9’x12’ with 16+ ft of roosting space between 2 beams.
Free range during the day
There is one smaller male (I believe) who is at the bottom of the pecking order, and there is 1 bigger male that has taken to especially bullying it the last week. He guards the coop door and prevents it getting in at night, chases it in laps around the yard, and chases it up into trees from branch to branch trying to get to it. His main behavior is pecking at his back and pulling out a feather or 2. When we force the runt into the coop at night, it immediately gets cornered until it flies up higher to one of the roosts to escape. The runt seems to have recently started challenging it back occasionally.
Do we need to intervene? We see a few options:
1. Let nature take its course, if the runt can’t get in at night, it’ll roost in the tree and eventually get eaten by something. Will this just cause the bully to find a new target? Which leads to option…
2. Cull the bully - or will another bully just take its place?
3. They’ve just started mating and laying eggs in the last week or 2, so is this just extra aggression from breeding season that will settle over time?
I know our flock can’t get much smaller without running into more aggression issues, so I’m trying to figure out a solution that causes the least loss of life.
I’m not sure that we want to add any more because they consume so much of our time already, and even if we did, they’d been too young to add to the flock for quite some time, so I’m not sure it would help anyway?
Thank you for reading my long question! We just aren’t sure what we should do. And we have a week-long trip coming up, so if we could get something figured out by the time we leave so they don’t all die while we’re gone, that would be ideal
