Hatcheries...

[mdbucks]

To give you a clue to how loud they can be my kids call them the Car Alarms, to anything that comes into the yard. They are loud enough that 12 SCREAMING at the same time scared a fox back into the woods.

 

[jkcove08]

They are the BEST!!!! I love mine soooo much. I currently have about 32 and cant wait to get more eggs to have more colors!! I will be selling eggs too in the spring!! I think they are my favorite birds of all. They run in about 3 different groups around the property and are soooo fun to watch!! Jenn

 

[Dinos_rock]

Quote:
I bet they'd make good watchdogs......

 

[patandchickens]

Oh man are guinea fowl ever loud. You really need to experience this firsthand before you decide to get any - informed consent and all that, you know?

When I was a kid in a suburb outside Philadelphia, this was back in the early seventies, a family around the corner was surreptitiously raising 2 guinea hens and a large white turkey. They had a tall solid privacy fence (pool in bkyd) so for a while no one was any the wiser, just mysterious noises from time to time... and then one day someone left a gate open and there went a large white turkey and two guineas wandering down the middle of the road! We were all pretty astonished.

They quickly recaptured the turkey but the guineas spent like the next 10 months or so annoying the bejeebers out of the entire neighborhood. Of course they were beautiful, but I can't tell you how many times I woke up at daybreak or so with these two darn things perched on the porch roof just outside my bedroom window making this HORRIBLE PIERCING NOISE THAT SPLITS YOUR HEAD OPEN. I remember this VERY CLEARLY! Also they had a tendency to wander into peoples' open garages, get shut in, make a racket while pooping generously on everything in sight, then make good their escape as soon as a door was opened. This did not make them popular either. Plus they sometimes chased cats.

[Er, so if you think about it, I guess they were kind of cool, weren't they

You gotta hand it to any kind of poultry that can survive, feral, for that long with that many dogs and cats and coons and possums and foxes around, not to mention that many people wanting to get their hands on 'em one way or another

]

After a while there was just one of them, and then not to long after there was none, and as far as I know the neighborhood has been poultry-free ever since. Which is maybe sort of sad, but still, D*MN those were loud birds

Pat, not anti-guinea-fowl, just in favor of educated purchase decisions <g>