Rotational Grazing, Soon-to-be First Time Guinea Mom

[belovedbeaky]

Hi BYC!
I'm currently a junior in high school involved with the Natural Resources program. We are starting all over again with new chicks (chickens), possibly Barred Rocks, Buff Orpingtons, and few Barnvelders. However, our campus is in the middle of the Sierra Nevada mountains area, surrounded by multitudes of wildlife, and we plan on doing rotational grazing with Barbados sheep and chickens to restore the soil and plant life to native grasses.
However, we wanted a form of protection/alarm system for the new chickens, and we thought that raising Guinea keets along with the chicks would create trust between the birds so that we would be alerted if a predator would prey on either them or the sheep.
I wanted to know more about raising guineas with chickens together, and how would I go about obtaining local keets in El Dorado County. Any advice is welcome.
Thank you on behalf of the Natural Resources Program!

 

[Gnfaz]

I am sure others will jump on this thread but wanted to welcome you. I have only had a couple of Guinea Fowl but they did great with my chickens. I even had one dive bomb and kill a snake that had gotten into my chicken run.
I have watched others drive off stray dogs. They are an awesome natural protection for both the chickens and sheep in my opinion. Good luck with your project.

 

[BlueShadow]

While there certainly are exceptions, usually guineas raised with chickens are pretty aggressive toward the chickens, especially the first year they are old enough for breeding.

Guineas will be a reasonable alarm system during the day - provided you can figure out if their alarm is because of a sparrow or a hawk. They tend to be noisy all the time so you do have to learn their different sounds to figure out which is the alarm call.

Their biggest fault is that they only sound a useful alarm during the day. When it is light out, they will sound a warning for other birds to head for cover. When they are roosting, they keep quiet and hope that the threat doesn't see them.

I have heard them sound an alarm for hawks, but when we had a dog attack our flock during the day, they were silent, just got out of there as fast as they could. I don't consider "alarm system" to be one of guineas' more valuable traits.

 

[belovedbeaky]

Alright, I did not know that. We intend to have a coop for the birds to stay in overnight, but there is little we can do during the day, so that sounds helpful.
I will take that into consideration ^^ Thank you.

 

[belovedbeaky]

I am sure others will jump on this thread but wanted to welcome you. I have only had a couple of Guinea Fowl but they did great with my chickens. I even had one dive bomb and kill a snake that had gotten into my chicken run.
I have watched others drive off stray dogs. They are an awesome natural protection for both the chickens and sheep in my opinion. Good luck with your project.

Thank you for the welcome. That sounds great! We're going to try to get them as close in age so that barriers don't spring up. Snakes are definitely a problem up here, so that would be helpful. Thank you so much !