Guinea Fowl – The Next Generations

February 8, 2020February 8, 2020 Jason Incubation - Hatching, Poultry Family, Guinea fowl, Homestead, incubation, Predators, reflections

A post on Guinea Fowl to make up for missed posts.

We’ve been raising Guinea fowl since we move out to Westport. Tricia ordered our first batch of 15 to help with bug control and because they are so ugly they are cute. They are free range and though we lock them up at night, the flocks numbers vary due to predators.

I wasn’t convinced they were doing all that great of a job until we lost all of them for about a year, summer to the next summer. The second summer, we had bad Japanese beetles and more ticks than normal. While America doesn’t have a predator for adult Japanese beetles, guineas eat the young grubs in the ground. Coincidence or not, I’m attributing the low beetle and tick population to the guineas.

Survivors. Far right is the lonely teen.

Starting 2019, our flock was down to 4. Guineas lay eggs in late May and like to lay in tall grass in the open field, not in convenient boxes like chickens. So it’s hard to get eggs to hatch; however, by keeping their aviary door closed for a few days, I was able to get 8 eggs in May; 4 hatched. I kept

these in the brooder about 5 weeks so they’d be bigger when introduced with the others. Guinea flocks are fickle and instead of having one flock of 8, we had a full grown flock of 4 and a flock of 4 smaller “teens”. They would not join flocks, but frequently the flocks congregated near each other.

In July something attacked them during the day. I had 8 when I let them out and that night only 3 adults, 2 injured, and 1 teen. While the Guineas didn’t want to combine flocks, they decided to take in the stray teen. So the adults adopted the teen and we were back to a flock of 4 again.

18 days prior to the attack we found a clutch of 40 guinea eggs hidden in tall weeds. I had people interested in guinea chicks if I could get them, so I figured I’d try hatching them. After the attach I was glad I did. I managed to fit 29 in the incubator, but not knowing which ones were newer or older it was just a crap-shoot on how many would hatch; 12 did.

Combined flock, teen is second from Right on the back perch.

I broodered these for about 2 1/2 weeks, then added them to our flock thinking we’d have 2 flocks again. I was pleasantly surprised to see the adults take them in. Maybe age was a factor. Or maybe with so many, they figured the better join forces or be the minority. 🙂

It’s been fun watching our 3 adults, 1 teen, and 12 younglings run around.

-Jason

Dual-purpose Chickens – 8 – Winter Water

February 25, 2017January 19, 2021 Jason Dual Purpose, Infrastructure, Layers, Poultry Design, Dual Purpose, Feed & Water, incubation, Plan, Poultry

In fall of 2014 I decided I wanted to raise some dual-purpose chickens. My focus is on a breed that lays good eggs which can be incubated to raise “panfry” broilers, pre-Cornish-Cross size meat birds. So, how do I keep the water from freezing?

One of banes of winter is frozen livestock water. In the past, we’ve use 3 plastic 1 gallon waterers and rotated them throughout the day, bringing the frozen ones in to thaw. This was not an optimal solution.

I did some searching and was intrigued by an idea of using a tire to accumulate solar heat, and straw and a board inside the tire as insulation. However, that would not work around here once the temperatures dropped well below freezing.

The idea I settled on was to use a concrete block with a light bulb inside, especially since the coop was going to be close to a power source. It was easy to make. Just an extension cord, a plugin light receptacle, a cooking tin, and a concrete block. Put the cord, receptacle , and light bulb together and slid them into the concrete block.

To keep the block sitting level, either chisel a grove in the concrete block or sit the block on two pieces of wood and run the cord in-between the two pieced of wood.

And cover with a tin pan, to keep moisture away from the light. Although I have metal waterers, I’m using the plastic ones as I think they handle the water freezing better.

I’m using a 60W bulb an it has worked pretty good. So far this year, most days stayed above 20 degrees , but a few days were close to zero. These days produced some frozen “rings” higher up in the waterer; however, the tray stayed unfrozen and the chickens had unfrozen water to drink. One thing to watch out for is that when the water gets close to being out, the waterer is lighter and easy to knocked off.

-Jason

Dual-purpose Chickens – 3 – Incubation

December 16, 2015January 6, 2016 Jason Dual Purpose, Incubation - Hatching, Layers, Poultry Brothers M, Dual Purpose, incubation, layers, Poultry

In fall of 2014 I decided I wanted to raise some dual-purpose chickens. The main focus was on incubating my own birds to raise as “panfrys”, traditional meat birds frequently used in pan frying. So let’s do some hatching.

Spring was rocking and rolling. The nine hens were producing 6-7 eggs on average and it didn’t take me long to fill all 27 slots in my incubator. I had purchased an INCUVIEW incubator off a recommendation from TSP Podcast 1373. I really like this incubator as it’s almost “set it and forget”. Periodic checking the humidity and straightening the rows of eggs are all that’s needed. The last 10 days of my 5th run went unattended while we were on vacation.

The Delaware/Buff mix produced a 74% hatch rate. Having never hatched chickens before we spend hours watching the chicks work their way out of the eggs.

Then off to the brooder to be raised like the other meat birds. This part of my plan went smoothly.

-Jason