Last week the guineas hatched out 9 keets.  They had been nesting inside the chicken house, a first here.  In the past they have nested out in the tall weeds and grasses around the farm.

I removed the remaining eggs, all cold, and dropped one.  The egg cracked and I opened it a bit to see if it was fertile, and there was a dead chick inside.  As I was carrying it, and the rest of the eggs to the house, to investigate the rest of the unhatched eggs, the chick moved!  I excavated it from it’s shell and put it in a tupperware on the kitchen table.  Two heating pads sandwiched the little guy’s bin to keep him warm.

Unfortunately, this little guy was spraddle-legged.  I kept him in the house for a few days, confined to his tupperware, and he slept inside a butter dish lined with a dish cloth.  The confinement helped his legs to grow straighter and he could get around better after a few days.  I returned him to the nest yesterday.

The bad news in all this is that all the chicks but one have now died.  Several were found inside the chicken house, and some are just missing.  I don’t know if the cats took some, or if they got too cold and didn’t stay under the hen, or what happened.  Today was the first day the hen has left the chicken house and there was only one chick with her.

I’m hoping our Leghorn chicken will do a better job; she is setting on a clutch of guinea eggs I borrowed from a neighbor.  She’s halfway through the incubation period, so has two weeks left to go.

If you read much about Guineas, you’ll be told they are terrible mothers and you should expect to lose most, if not all, the keets if left to their own devices to hatch and rear their young themselves.  Having read and been told this myself many times, I still hoped things would go well.  We had two good years here where the guineas hatched out and reared over 20 keets from each clutch.  We had guineas coming out of our ears.  The adults were more wild than tame, and I think that was key to them raising them so successfully.  Predators were a minimum because our farm dog does his job well.

If this hen continues to want to nest in the chicken house, I will have to either take her eggs and hatch them out under a chicken, or remove the chicks once they hatch, and rear them myself.  Hopefully the Leghorn hen will surprise me and be an excellent mother, stranger things have happened.