Not sure how this relates to crafting but wanted to share this thought while it was fresh in my mind. Maybe by the time I am done typing I will have figured out a way to tie it together! Gotta worn ya it's a little long, but had to write it all down. Leaving part out would lose part of the fun!
Guinea genius! Well, anyone who has ever raised guineas knows these two words do not generally go together. Guineas are African type chickens that are usually blackish gray with white dots, and have the gift of flight a little better then chickens. Very pretty birds, but apparently not the brightest. They are flock birds that love to be with their buddies, and panic when they are separated, and apparently when they are separated their brain goes with the flock and they are left to manage life brainless!! Not the best situation for the bird, but does bring some funny moments to my life!
I decided we needed guineas this spring when the grasshopper herd in our yard became so bad it was alot like you were parting the red sea of hoppers when you crossed the yard. My oldest daughter figured out quickly that you wanted to be the first person crossing the yard so that all the hoppers you scared up jumped up and landed on the people behind you, not on you! Which of course led to screaming from my son and littlest girl and to me yelling, "Stop screaming! They're just grasshoppers!" But I have to admit when 20 to 30 little beggers are flyin around ya and landing on ya it is hard not to holler! So the guineas were bought.
Raising them up really wasn't too hard. Water, feed, clean cages, water, feed, clean cages etc.. Except for the extreme heat we experienced getting one, and not realizing they could fly getting two (the cage was cracked, two flew the coop, and I chased them with my youngest on my hip through the creek and alfalfa. note to self: guineas are fast next time take a net!) So we had to move them to something a little bigger, which turned out to be the rabbit hutch! Yep guineas in a rabbit hutch. The rabbit was moved to the ground for awhile and she didn't seem to mind. The guinea raising all in all so far was uneventful! Until the first sign that guineas are not so smart.
Went out to feed them in the evening and one little guinea had his head stuck in the feeder. He was panicking and flappin around and raising a lot of ruckus, and of course freaking out the other ones, so I picked up the feeder and guinea and began to wiggle him carefully free. He was very stuck! Not sure how this happened since they were only maybe 3 or 4 weeks old and their heads were tiny and the feeder was plenty big enough??? Anyways, set him free and he seemed fine running around with his buddies happy to be free. But by the next morning he was no more. Guineas babies don't do well with stress. So in the end we started with 29 guinea babies, and raised up 25 good looking adolescent birds! I was pretty proud!
I wanted the guineas to be caged at night to help cut down on the lose of birds due to predators, so we built a temporary coop. Our chicken coop is still in the planning stage. Now we just had to get 25 half grown birds from the chicken coop, up the yard about 100 feet into a make shift coop with the help of 3 small children, 3 very curious cats, and 2 extremely bird hungry looking dogs! So I grabbed my trusty cat carrier, (you must have one if you live in the country) and stuck my head into the rabbit hutch to grab up some birds. My husband was holding the carrier, and I'm pretty sure he was mumbling something about me being mentally nuts, while I tried to grab flapping, scrambling guineas. I was at first trying to be oh, so careful not to stress them out but that fell by the wayside when the first little sucker pecked the living crap out of my arm!! @#** @#%% is what I said to the bird, and began to grab and shove not go gingerly into the carrier deciding I didn't care if they were stressed. My kids were a little concerned telling me to, "be carefuly mom, their just babies." These little suckers were kinda mean! We decided to move 1/2 the first night just incase our coop was not so predator proof.
This is were the guineas truly showed what highly intelligent birds they are. ha! They slowly came out of the carrier, and sat there looking around like "Hey, this is new! Where's Frank, and Tony?" They must of decided their buddies were lost and not coming back so they got their wits about them, huddled into a mass and sat there. Then after 10 min. or so they began to attempt to fly away!! This is a coop. With a wire top!! Granted maybe they couldn't see the wire on top, but now that I have been around guineas for awhile, I am pretty sure they could, they just didn't care! They would fly up, whack the wire and fall back down, every once in awhile one would grab onto the wire, and it would hang upside down for a moment before plummeting back to the earth. Brilliant!
The next morning proved our guinea coop building abilities to be solid, as all of them were still there, and nothing had burrowed in! Yeah! My husband was at work so I wasn't sure how to get the rest from the hutch to the coop. Lucky me, my parents and sister pulled in for a visit. So I grabbed my sister, handed her the cat carrier and said follow me. She has awhile back decided that I am nuts, so she asked what the carrier was for, listened to the answer, and just said Ok.
We get in the rabbit hutch, I give her instructions on how to hold the carrier up at an angle so they can't fly out, and to keep the door of it shut until I have a bird ready, and we begin! I will say, this is the one moment when the guineas showed some brain power. They had watched their buddies get taken to who knows where yesterday, so today they were putting up a fight! After several scratches, beakings, and wings in my face the rest were wrangled into the carrier. My sister even got pecked through the holes in the end of the carrier. These birds do have a little fight in them!
We deposited the rest of the guineas with their long lost friends, and this is truly how they reacted. Like it was family they had lost years ago, and they finally got to see again. They rushed to each other and cheeped, and chirped and carried on. They must of been telling the new guineas about the top of the cage, because not a one of the second bunch tried to fly out? But a couple did walk right over to where our dog sat and stuck it's head right out of the chicken wire to get a closer look! Dumb! Luckily we have a hot wire around the cage so the dog was just far enough back not to get a snack, and we quickly decided to add screen around the bottom to avoid this happening again.
They have been happily living in the cage for several weeks now just being released in small amounts in hopes of training our dogs not to attack them. SO far so good except for two casualties! But they have brought me several moments of sheer laughter! They will come out of the cage in their tightly packed flock, and go out bug hunting. One will almost always have its head down in the grass, not paying attention to the rest and get left behind. It will look up, look around, and when he realizes he is alone he panics! Then he will proceed to run around, truly like a chicken with it's head cut off, squalling for his buddies until they are reunited. If they get separated by the wire of the chicken coop, meaning some are inside the coop and some are still out, they panic! Instead of working their way around the coop to find the opening, they will continuously run their heads into the wire trying desperately to get in in the same place over and over again! Doesn't hurt them any, since there is nothing in their heads, but is kinda funny to watch. Alot like watching someone walk into a glass door that they think is open. We do always take pity on the little lost guinea and shoo him around to the door!
But the last, and truly funniest thing I have seen them do is fall out of a tree! Yep! They like to roost up in trees so the first day I left them out for awhile unattended I went back later to check and they were all 10 feet or so up in a tree. They were happily roosting and peeking the tree branches and apparently fighting over good spots because right before my eyes, Flumph!! One was pushed off a branch by another and in a flurry of feathers, it landed at my feet. He laid there for a minute stunned, then he fluffed himself up, and looked around like he was saying, "what the crap?" He looked up and saw his buddies, I think they were laughing and hi-fiving the pusher, and he flew right back up. It wasn't 10 minutes later and another bit the dust! It was truly amazing and tear rolling funny to watch. I do believe they are better at roosting now as I haven't seen any fall in a couple of days!
But anyways, that is the story of my guineas! They are weird, fun birds to have that earn their keep in the amount of bugs they eat.
What I can take away from this story in the world of crafts, and I guess life is, don't be a guinea! Don't follow right along with the herd. It can cause you to beat your head senselessly against the wall, or coop. Think for yourself when you are crafting, find what works best for you. ANd I guess if you fail, or get shoved out of the tree, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and fly right back up there!
Okay that was pretty cheesey! But it is so true~!
Hope you enjoyed my oh so true story!
Keep on crafting!
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