The Lost Has Been Found!!

My sister was finally able to locate the hidding guinea nest.  It had 60+ eggs in it, and out of those 60+ only 6 of them were bad.  I didn't know how old the eggs were, and since they were too heavy to float properly, I had no idea which ones weren't good any longer, so I gave them all to my chickens.  I had some very very happy hens lemme tell you what!!! LOL

The guineas are most displeased, and Ms. Bunny didn't steal all the eggs, leaving about 5 so they would potentially still lay their eggs there, but the nest was kind of really gross.  I went in to look at it and they had obviously been laying their eggs here for a good LONG time.  You could SMELL the nest long before you saw it... and it makes me really wonder how in the world I ever missed it!!  However, in my defense, they DID choose to lay their eggs underneath a large mulberry tree that drooped down to the ground and created a natural "cave" of sorts.  I think it even ended up "protecting" them from most of the rain, which is kind of neat.

Ever since the summer warmth kicked in I stopped bothering to pen them up, so they've been "on their own" without me feeding them at all for probably close to 4-months. 

We had 4 guineas to start with, thought we had at least 1 roo, but have not seen any keets out of them, so if we do have a roo, the hens are just too stupid to properly raise the chicks and keep walking away from them & they all die... OR we don't have a roo at all.  Either way... I'm not very impressed with guineas.  Thinking of butchering them out when I butcher out the roosters... but we'll see.

First attempt at chicken mash of sorts

My husband has 4 roosters & a hen he intends me to butcher out.  They are all bantams, and since I have zero experience butchering chickens out as of yet, Daddy Frog is saying that working these out will be good experience for me, because even if it doesn't work out and I totally screw them up, that by the time I get through all 5 I should have some idea of how to do it correctly when I try to do it on the adults!  :-)

Anyway, these 5 bantams love to waste TONS of food.  I got sick & tired of it.  They are costing me money (because they are in a rabbit cage and keep beaking their food out of the feeder, allowing it to fall through the cage floor to the ground below.  The guineas clean up after them, but the whole purpose in keeping these birds alive in the first place was to fatten them up.. and all of the "fat food" (meat bird food) keeps getting kicked out and they're only getting part of it... so aggravating!!  So, I poured water all over it and crammed their feeder full!  It worked!!  :-D  Yay!!

It worked with them, so then I did the same thing with my beeplas, and it worked even better with them!  I think this may be the way I feed them from now on!  I am so stoked!!

I've been buying 50# of feed every two weeks (32 birds eat a lot...who'd have thought?), then combining it with the free cast off (straw, cracked wheat, buckwheat hulls, corn shells etc) from the mill, and the corn meal unsuitable for  human consumption, also from the mill.  The chickens love it, but there is a lot of waste when this mixture gets put into the feeders.  This mash idea... this could really work.  It is A LOT messier for me, because I don't have a system down yet, but so far there has been no waste, and the beeplas seemed to be able to eat it a lot easier.  What with the food having been partially softened with the water and so forth. :-)

Guinea troubles

We have 4 pearl guinea fowl.  They went out with my ISA Brown hens 3-days ago to forage and free-range, but they wouldn't come back to the pen that night so I assumed that they would probably come back after they got hungry, thirsty & cold.  Which is somewhat true.  They did come back, but still wouldn't go INTO the pen.  Argh!!  I HATE THESE BIRDS!!!

I had considered allowing the female to hatch a brood, then eat the keets, but at the rate they're going, they're not going to make it there!

They made me chase them all over the barn, then one of the male's attacked my leg while I was trying to catch his female, so I'm not too thrilled about that, but it didn't hurt nearly as much as I imagined it might.  Their beaks are very evil looking, likewise their talons, but this time, for some reason, it didn't really "hurt" as much as just made me mad.  Perhaps it will hurt later?

In the process of trying to catch one of the females, she got hurt.  When I finally caught her, she had blood all over her head.  So I planned to put her into isolation, then realized the isolation crate wasn't ready to be used like that.  Chicken Ann had taken two of her rabbit cages and spliced them together to make a longer rabbit cage for the guinea's when they were still super small.  Once they were large enough to be put into the main pen we had put the isolation crate aside.  Since using it last, some of the metal pieces had come loose so there were wires that could potentially hurt any birds that got put into it, as well as both front load doors having come loose so the bird could potentially get out on her own. 

I had Dad help me with it, and between the two of us we caught all of those confounded birds, but golly I'm ready to forget all about these dumb animals and just eat them for dinner!

On the bright side, the female who has been laying multiple eggs every day, and is attempting to start a "clutch" of eggs, decided to lay her egg outside the door to the hen house since she couldn't get to her nest.

Mom believes I should leave her eggs alone, let them just sit on the ground for her to sit on, but I keep taking them out anyway.  I don't want the chickens to re-learn how to eat their eggs...

Chicken roost's & new fluffy butt prep - guinea/chicken hybrids

I feel highly accomplished.  I pulled a couple random branches & old pieces of wood down to the chicken house and arranged them in such a way as to allow the chickens more room to roost so they stop picking on each other.

I don't know if it will help, since the ISA Browns we have are rather lacking in intelligence sometimes.  Although, admittedly, it isn't entirely their fault because they were chicks without a mother to teach them to do things like roost and scratch for food so they had to learn these "skills" by themselves, or in the case of roosting on sticks, we had to teach them.

Either way, later on when the other chicks come I don't think these new roosts will go to waste because either they won't use them and Hubby will hang another pallet mid-air for me, or they do use them and he doesn't need to help me.  Either way I'm sure it will be fine.

I have approximately 8 days to wait for my chicks to arrive give or take a day or two... and I'm excited, not going to lie.  I need to go to the co-op and buy some chick starter and little things like that, but mostly I'm prepared for them to arrive. :-)

*Gets distracted by Hubby*

I just realized after talking with Hubs and googling a little bit that my husbands guinea roo's are covering my ISA Brown hens.  I'm freaking out. LOL!!  I google image searched it and these resulting hybrids are UGLY!!  But you know what?  I bet it wouldn't be difficult to tell them out of the rest of the flock when it came time to cull them out!!  I wonder how they taste... Hmmm... Interesting.  May need to run with this.  But the hybrids crossed with a naked neck chicken end up looking like buzzards!!  I'm laughing so hard right now, no kidding!!