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Yes they would be more productive in their role of insect eating if they were loose during the day. However having said that clipping their wings won't keep them on your property. Most of the guinea fowl I've had leave just walked away. One of my males made it over seven miles from home. The odd thing was he was hatched at our place. He simply left after he lost his mate. I don't really understand guinea fowl any better after having them for seven years BUT I can fairly accurately predict their behavior now.
From my experience & steep learning curve in guinea fowl I can say with confidence:
#1. If a guinea fowl up to and including fully feathered out ends up in water it will die. We lost some that were roosting in the goat shed one bitterly cold winter stretch. We could not understand why we were finding dead guinea fowl regularly in a water bucket in the goat shed. It seems that they were enjoying roosting on the rim of the bucket for the heat that escaped overnight from the surface of the water. Unfortunately when one would slip into the bucket there it would stay and drown. Keep in mind that if they had stood up they were tall enough to breath & certainly they could have jumped high enough to get out of the bucket. Yet we lost at least half a dozen to that particular guinea death trap. I have found them drowned in mortar pans that we fill with water for our ducks to swim in. A mortar pan is what maybe six inches deep?
#2. Even if you clip the wings a guinea will climb a six foot fence. This lesson was brought home to us when we started keeping some for breeding purposes one summer in chain link dog kennels. We at first could not understand how we were finding them out again in the evenings. Eventually we saw a guinea flapping like a hummingbird while climbing foot over foot up the chain link.
#3. If you decide to let them raise their own offspring - lock them up until the keets are completely feathered out. We had been fairly successful one summer at getting the hens to hatch their own broods but learned that the moms would take the keets out into the dew covered grass and lose a whole clutch at a time. If a guinea keet gets damp it WILL DIE. SO we kept them in the next summer for about four weeks. We finally were allowing the moms, dads & keets out to free range during the day when we got a sudden torrential down pour. Yep, you probably guessed it the mostly feather out keets died. I went looking when I realized they hadn't come in from the rain and found dead and dying keets strung out across a field.
#4. Contrary to what I believed male guineas will fight. And if you have an extreme imbalance in male to female ratio (say 8 out of 13 male) they WILL KILL EACH OTHER. Our first year we started with 24 keets. The next spring we noticed that the thirteen surviving guinea fowl were doing that "cute lift the wings and race like road runners" competition for pairing rights. Then we noticed every couple of days we'd find a ratty looking beat up dead male guinea fowl hidden somewhere at evening chores. We thought that maybe one of our roosters was beating the tar & feathers out of them as we had seen kicking matches between guinea & roosters as well as guineas & turkeys. Nope eventually we find a pair locked in mortal combat behind a calf hutch.
I hope that some of this helps you with your "adventures in guinea fowl".
I have a wet weather pond that gradually drops to a depth of about a foot. Will they wander in and drown?
Yes they would be more productive in their role of insect eating if they were loose during the day. However having said that clipping their wings won't keep them on your property. Most of the guinea fowl I've had leave just walked away. One of my males made it over seven miles from home. The odd thing was he was hatched at our place. He simply left after he lost his mate. I don't really understand guinea fowl any better after having them for seven years BUT I can fairly accurately predict their behavior now.
From my experience & steep learning curve in guinea fowl I can say with confidence:
#1. If a guinea fowl up to and including fully feathered out ends up in water it will die. We lost some that were roosting in the goat shed one bitterly cold winter stretch. We could not understand why we were finding dead guinea fowl regularly in a water bucket in the goat shed. It seems that they were enjoying roosting on the rim of the bucket for the heat that escaped overnight from the surface of the water. Unfortunately when one would slip into the bucket there it would stay and drown. Keep in mind that if they had stood up they were tall enough to breath & certainly they could have jumped high enough to get out of the bucket. Yet we lost at least half a dozen to that particular guinea death trap. I have found them drowned in mortar pans that we fill with water for our ducks to swim in. A mortar pan is what maybe six inches deep?
#2. Even if you clip the wings a guinea will climb a six foot fence. This lesson was brought home to us when we started keeping some for breeding purposes one summer in chain link dog kennels. We at first could not understand how we were finding them out again in the evenings. Eventually we saw a guinea flapping like a hummingbird while climbing foot over foot up the chain link.
#3. If you decide to let them raise their own offspring - lock them up until the keets are completely feathered out. We had been fairly successful one summer at getting the hens to hatch their own broods but learned that the moms would take the keets out into the dew covered grass and lose a whole clutch at a time. If a guinea keet gets damp it WILL DIE. SO we kept them in the next summer for about four weeks. We finally were allowing the moms, dads & keets out to free range during the day when we got a sudden torrential down pour. Yep, you probably guessed it the mostly feather out keets died. I went looking when I realized they hadn't come in from the rain and found dead and dying keets strung out across a field.
#4. Contrary to what I believed male guineas will fight. And if you have an extreme imbalance in male to female ratio (say 8 out of 13 male) they WILL KILL EACH OTHER. Our first year we started with 24 keets. The next spring we noticed that the thirteen surviving guinea fowl were doing that "cute lift the wings and race like road runners" competition for pairing rights. Then we noticed every couple of days we'd find a ratty looking beat up dead male guinea fowl hidden somewhere at evening chores. We thought that maybe one of our roosters was beating the tar & feathers out of them as we had seen kicking matches between guinea & roosters as well as guineas & turkeys. Nope eventually we find a pair locked in mortal combat behind a calf hutch.
I hope that some of this helps you with your "adventures in guinea fowl".
I have a wet weather pond that gradually drops to a depth of about a foot. Will they wander in and drown?
