Keets on the Move
September 3rd, 2013 · No Comments · Posted in farming
After seven weeks in the basement brooder, it was finally time for our Guinea fowl chicks–aka keets–to get a taste of the outdoors and move to their new home on the front pasture.
If this structure looks familiar, it should. I built it almost exactly as I did the coop for our laying hens, except there are no wheels. And instead of nesting boxes on the sides, there are big windows for ventilation. This is where the keets will stay for the next couple of weeks. Hopefully during that time they will bond with their new home so we can let them out and they won’t want to run away. In theory, they’ll return to the coop each night to sleep like our chickens do.
Meanwhile, their job is to patrol the property for ticks. They love to eat small insects and weed seeds, which makes them a real asset on the farm. Guinea fowl are also said to be terrific guard birds. They let out a terrible shreik when confronted with a person or animal unknown to them. We shall see.
Rounding them up in the brooder is a bit like squeezing on a water balloon, as you can see in the video above. Approach them from the left and they scurry to the right. Reach from the right and they run back to the left. Eventually they leap out of the brooder and chaos ensues as we chase them around the basement, the object being to get them inside our animal carrier so we can transport them out to the coop.
I admit, my cinematography is not the best. Space is tight in the basement around the brooder. But I think you get the idea.
Here is our destination, about 100 yards from the house. The keets are heavy in their carrier. On the first trip, my wife and daughter managed to grab eight of them. Already they are about the size of our chickens but they’re not nearly full grown. I feel bad they have to spend two weeks walking around on the wire floor in this coop. The wire hardware cloth is supposed to allow their droppings to fall to the ground, but it’s hard on the birds’ feet. Better would be if they learned to use the four perches I built into the coop. You can see a couple of them crossing side-to-side. They’re staggered in height, like a ladder, with 12 inches of space between each perch. The chickens love theirs.
Now the moment has arrived. We introduce the keets to their new home, emptying the animal crate into the coop. The keets pour out. Sort of. At this point, they seem a bit stunned. For quite a while they are quite subdued, walking gingerly on the wire. But soon we hear them peeping and warbling softly, singing to each other. That tells me they are content. We’ll just have to see what happens two weeks from now when we open the door for them to start exploring the grounds.
Our job done, wife and daughter return to the house while I continue my farm chores. But barely a minute passes before I hear someone shouting my name. “Ed, there’s a keet loose in the basement!”
Sure enough, we missed one. The chase is on again….
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