Feathered Friend Friday

I thought it would be fun to start a new series called "Feathered Friend Friday." The plan is that every Friday I will write a post with interesting facts, photos, or funny stories about chickens. I'm a bit obsessed with my girls, so this is a good way to share my love of all things chicken! If you need to catch up, you'll find all the Feathered Friend Friday posts here.

It appears that we have a broody guinea. A VERY broody guinea.

On Tuesday of this week, David noticed one of the white guineas sitting in some of the taller weeds behind the chicken run. When we fed them for the night and they were adequately distracted (go here to see why we have to distract them), we decided to inspect and found a huge clutch of eggs.

36 to be exact. We decided to take 8 of the eggs and bring them in so that hopefully the guineas would still lay in this nest. This way we could mark the ones that are out there and only bring in the newly laid ones each day so we'd know they were fresh and good to eat.

It appears that the guineas had other plans! The next day we noticed the white guinea sitting on the nest all day long. That night when we fed them, she didn't come out to eat - we found her still sitting on the nest protecting the clutch of eggs. Guineas (especially white ones) laying on nests are prime targets for predators, so I was a little worried to leave her there all night. The nest is pretty close to the chicken run where Duchess is, so we hoped that she would scare off any predators that came near. We decided to let her be and hope for the best.

Tonight when I got home, I tiptoed into the weeds to see if she was still on the nest. Yep, there she was, and I didn't want to get too close to her, but it didn't look like she was moving at all. I started to walk closer and she still didn't move, so my first thought was that something killed her. I threw a stick over in her direction and still no movement. I got right up next to her and poked her and she puffed up and made this horrible noise!

Once she saw how close I was, she spread her wings out over the eggs and hissed at me so I backed off! Guess we won't be eating these eggs after all. We're kind of playing it by ear, but I think we'll let her stay on the nest and see what happens, doing a lot of research in the meantime since we've heard guineas don't make the best mothers.

Who knows, in 3 weeks we may have lots of little keets running around!

~Tammy