Our Guinea Fowl Surprise Themselves
I get a few emails every week asking me how long my wife and I spend walking around with cameras to capture the Guinea fowl photos we get. There’s no easy answer to that. We don’t take Guinea fowl photos every day on any kind of a schedule. But since we both like to take photos of the Guinea fowl, we do it frequently. When we do get our camera equipment gathered up and head out to take Guinea fowl photos, we usually stay out anywhere from 2-4 hours. The we come back inside, upload the photos to the computers and start deleting the bad ones – and saving the good ones. We take about 200 Guinea fowl photos to get one that we will keep. Of those, we’ll publish one out of every five.
Taking photos of Guinea fowl requires three things: 1) Good camera equipment, including at least a 300mm telephoto lens. 2) Patience. 3) Luck. I dare say that luck is as important as anything else – maybe more so. Getting photos of Guinea fowl flying is almost pure luck. The camera has to be in the right place at the right time. The photographer must be ready. The Guinea fowl must not fly in front of the sun, and so forth.
The two Guinea fowl photos at the end of this blog are an example of the type of Guinea fowl photos we can get when luck is on our side.
The two Guinea fowl photos that follow are taken about 2 seconds apart. The first shows the Guinea fowl roosting in a dead pine tree. Note on the left side of that first photo that there are several Guinea fowl roosting on the higher of the two branches.
In the second Guinea fowl photo, note that the branch has been broken and the Guinea fowl are all flying away – even the ones on the ground near the dead tree. You can actually see that the branch is still falling in the photo. The weight of the Guinea fowl on the branch broke it – and boy did that ever scare the dickens out of the Guinea fowl. The birds took off and flew for almost ½ mile before landing. Of course, they started at an elevation. That tree is on a very steep, rock hillside about 200′ from ground level.
Enjoy these rare Guinea fowl photos!
Guinea Fowl & Mustangs – The promised Photos
As promised, here are photos of our Guinea fowl meeting up with a herd of wild mustangs. Unlike domesticated horses, the mustangs are wild, aggressive and dangerous.
Photos of Guinea Fowl Flying
If you follow this blog, you know that one of my quests is to capture high quality photos of flying Guinea fowl. You might think it should be easy for me to get photos of flying Guinea fowl, considering that I have a flock of 30 pearl grey Guinea fowl to snap photos of. But believe me, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
In pursuit of our quest, my wife and I have spent countless hours following our flock of Guinea fowl around our property, with cameras in hand. We have taken thousands of photos of flying Guinea fowl, but only a few have been considered good enough to keep, and we are still pursuing that ‘perfect’ flying Guinea fowl photo.
Below are some of the best photos we’ve taken of our Guinea fowl while they are flying, landing and taking off. I hope you enjoy looking at these photos.
Guinea Fowl and Flying Montana Predators
At the end of this entry there are four photographs of a hawk. The photos were taken while I was on my way to town in southeastern Montana. I apologize for the lack of crispness, but I only had a small camera with me. It seems like whenever I don’t take along a big camera, something very picture-worthy appears.
Here in Montana, our flock of 30 pearl grey Guinea fowl must be on the lookout for all manner of flying predators. We have them all! Eagles, hawks, falcons and owls abound in this region. The falcons and some of the hawks are not much of a threat to our Guinea fowl, but the owls, the eagles and some of the hawks present serious threats.
If you’ve never seen an eagle up close and personal, you’ve missed a real treat. These massive birds of prey are incredibly impressive to observe. An adult eagle can fly down and scarf up a full grown Guinea fowl as easily as you can scarf up a glazed donut off a plate at work. You simply pass by, grab it and never break stride. An eagle will do the same thing to a Guinea fowl, only on the wing. It will fly down, grab the Guinea fowl and continue on as though it had nothing in its razor sharp talons.
Our biggest indigenous owl is the Great Horned owl. Unlike the eagle, the comparatively small owl does not swoop down and carry off its prey. Rather, owls strike and kill, and then eat their prey at the kill site. Of course, owls may carry away part of their kill to eat later or feed to their offspring. Guinea fowl are no match for owls, despite the fact that some Guinea fowl are actually larger than the owls that attack them. Owls are equipped to kill, Guinea fowl are equipped to eat bugs and vegetation. I’ve seen a Guinea fowl coop yard that suffered an owl attack. The heads were missing from several Guinea fowl, and there were feathers everywhere.
Some varieties of hawks are quite lethal to Guinea fowl. The hawk shown in the picture is large enough and adequately equipped by Mother Nature to make quick work of a Guinea fowl. The hawks around here mostly dine on the countless field mice that inhabit the area. But they don’t mind at all eating chickens, peacocks, Guinea fowl, ducks and wild turkeys. They just need the right opportunity.
I’ve watched countless hawks attack field mice. They do a diving attack, and frequently then go back up into the sky a bit, and attack again. Sometimes they will carry off dead prey, other times they’ll eat it where they attacked it. I’ve never witnessed a Guinea fowl being attacked by a hawk, but I assume that Guinea fowl are too big for hawks to easily fly away with, and thus they are eaten on the spot.
In one of the photos below, you’ll see the hawk with his freshly killed field mouse in his sharp beak. Moments after I shot this photograph the hawk took off and disappeared into the sky with the mouse.
Our Guinea Fowl Go Exploring
Not long ago on this blog I mentioned that our flock of 30 pearl grey Guinea fowl was wandering further and further from home. I attributed our Guinea fowl’s new wanderlust to the disappearance of insects and green vegetation. No insect can survive our frigid winters here, and the only greenery is the needles on the pine trees – not something the Guinea fowl are inclined to eat. In any event, since the arrival of winter, our Guinea fowl have been foraging further and further away from their coop and coop yard.
According to everything I’ve read, Guinea fowl will roam up to ¼ mile away from their roosting area. In the case of our Guinea fowl, the roosting area is the coop and coop yard. Our flock of 30 pearl grey Guinea fowl has indeed, since winter, been getting out a full ¼ mile from the coop. Oddly, they only wander to the east, south and west – not the north. I have no idea why.
Today, the neighbor who lives closest to me stopped by. This is an unusual event, to be sure. I get along well with my neighbors, but they’re busy and so are we and so we don’t socialize much at all. We mostly visit at harvest time when we exchange vegetables fresh from our gardens. This neighbor lives a full ½ mile away, and he stopped to tell me that our flock of Guinea fowl had visited his house yesterday.
According to my neighbor, our Guinea fowl went to their place and foraged with their small flock of wild turkeys for about an hour. That’s right – my neighbor has a flock of wild turkeys. They are not completely domesticated, but they’re pretty close to it. The flock has been living at their place for many years. The turkeys will not allow my neighbor or his family members to get any closer to them than about 10 yards, but that’s a whole lot closer than you’ll get to a wild turkey in the wild.
My neighbor said the Guinea fowl and the turkeys were all having a big time foraging together. He said the two mingled flocks of birds meandered out towards the east, closer to the gravel/dirt road that is our primary artery out here. Apparently, when a noisy pickup truck went down the road, putting up quite the cloud of red dust, the Guinea fowl started running, and then flying towards their coop. Little wonder. Back here where we live, you can neither see nor hear vehicles out on the gravel road. So our Guinea fowl are not at all used to such a disturbance.
This neighbor lives, as I said, a good ½ mile away. He also lives to the southeast – one of the directions our Guinea fowl seem to be comfortable traveling. As a matter of courtesy, I asked my neighbor if the Guinea fowl being on his place bothered him. He immediately said it did not, and in fact he liked the idea of them cleaning up insects on his property. I knew he wouldn’t mind the Guinea fowl. His goats wander onto my place all the time – daily, in fact. Out here that’s just the way of things.
I don’t really mind the Guinea fowl roaming that far from their coop. I just wish they’d start wandering to the north. Our property extends furthest in that direction, and we have a huge field that is overrun with grasshoppers every year. The grasshoppers get so bad back there that they actually cause damage to the grasses. If the Guinea fowl don’t learn to go back there on their own, next year we’ll have to use the cowbell to call them back there. I’m sure once the Guinea fowl sample the insect bounty, they’ll head that way all the time on their own.
Auditing Our Guinea Fowl
Considering it’s winter, yesterday was a pretty nice day here. It was mostly sunny and 41°F with a modest 12 MPH wind blowing. My wife and I figured that this would be a decent day to try and audit our flock of 30 pearl grey Guinea fowl. So we gathered up the things we needed for our task and headed outside. Little did we know what challenges awaited us…
We’ve had our flock of 30 pearl grey Guinea fowl for almost 6 months now. We count the Guinea fowl regularly, to ensure none of them are left out of the coop at night. We also like to ensure that no Guinea fowl have been taken by any of our area’s predators. We have lots of predators – both the flying and the crawling varieties. Counting the 30 Guinea fowl is no easy task. The birds move quickly and often, and it’s hard to remember which ones have been counted, and which ones need to be counted.
The purpose of us doing an audit of our Guinea fowl is to determine how many females and how many males we have. Since our Guinea fowl won’t lay eggs during the short, cold days of winter, it’s not necessary to know the ratio of male to female right now. However, come spring and summer it would be really good to know how many hens will be laying eggs. This is important because we intend to both eat the Guinea fowl eggs and also incubate some of them.
We only know of one surefire way to determine if a Guinea fowl is a female: the call. Females will sometimes imitate male calls, but males will not ever imitate female calls. Ergo, any Guinea fowl that makes the famous buck-WHEAT call can be marked as a female Guinea fowl, or hen.
So, what we had to do was first listen to determine where a Guinea fowl hen was in the flock. Then we’d mark her down and cull her out of the flock and put her in the coop yard. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? It’s not.
Guinea fowl are flocking birds, and they definitely don’t like it when you try to separate them from their flock mates. Even with two people and two herding dogs – one of which is extremely good at Guinea fowl herding – we found it all but impossible to separate a single Guinea fowl from the flock. Just about the time we thought we were going to get one of the audited hens into its coop yard, she’d use her secret Guinea fowl weapon: her wings! Not much we could do once the Guinea fowl took to the air and rejoined their flock.
Of course, when one audited Guinea fowl would rejoin its flock, it was impossible to tell which bird it was. We have 30 pearl grey Guinea fowl and they all look identical to us. Hence, any auditing we’d done was no longer valid, and we’d have to start over again.
We spent almost 4 hours working to get an accurate audit. I’m so glad we live in a remote area with no close neighbors so that nobody could see us outside in the cold air running around with notepads chasing Guinea fowl. It must have been quite a sight.
I think we’ll just toss the idea of auditing our Guinea fowl into the bin of bad ideas. I guess we’ll just figure out how many female Guinea fowl we have as time passes, though I’m not sure how. One thing I do know, however. I will never again do what I did yesterday. I’m too old to spend hours running around rough terrain in cold air while trying to count Guinea fowl.
