Poultry: A Practical Guide to the Choice, Breeding, Rearing, and Management of all Descriptions of Fowls, Turkeys, Guinea-fowls, Ducks, and Geese, for Profit and Exhibition.Piper, Hugh
Science
Poultry: A Practical Guide to the Choice, Breeding, Rearing, and Management of all Descriptions of Fowls, Turkeys, Guinea-fowls, Ducks, and Geese, for Profit and Exhibition.
Piper, Hugh
Poultry -- Breeding
The Guinea-fowls make very little use of their wings,
and if forced to take to flight, fly but a short distance, then alight,
and trust to their rapid mode of running, and their dexterity in
threading the mazes of brushwood and dense herbage, for security. They
are shy, wary, and alert.
It is not much kept, its habits being wandering, and requiring an
extensive range, but as it picks up nearly all its food, and is very
prolific, it may be made very profitable in certain localities. The
whole management of both the young and the old may be precisely the same
as that of turkeys, in hatching, feeding, and fattening. This "species,"
says Mr. Dickson, "differs from all other poultry, in its being
difficult to distinguish the cock from the hen, the chief difference
being in the colour of the wattles, which are more of a red hue in the
cock, and more tinged with blue in the hen. The cock has also a more
stately strut."
They mate in pairs, and therefore an equal number of cocks and hens must
be kept, or the eggs will prove unfertile. To obtain stock, some of
their eggs must be procured, and placed under a common hen; for if old
birds are bought, they will wander away for miles in search of their old
home, and never return. They should be fed regularly, and must always
have one meal at night, or they will scarcely ever roost at home. They
will not sleep in the fowl-house, but prefer roosting in the lower
branches of a tree, or on a thick bush, and retire early. They make a
peculiar, harsh, querulous noise, which is oft-repeated, and not
agreeable. The hens are prolific layers, beginning in May, and
continuing during the whole summer. Their eggs are small, but of
excellent flavour, of a pale yellowish red, finely dotted with a darker
tint, and remarkable for the hardness of the shell. The hen usually lays
on a dry bank, in secret places; and a hedgerow a quarter of a mile off
is quite as likely to contain her nest as any situation nearer her home.
She is very shy, and, if the eggs are taken from her nest, will desert
it, and find another; a few should, therefore, always be left, and it
should never be visited when she is in sight. But she often contrives to
elude all watching, and hatch a brood, frequently at a late period,
when the weather is too cold for the chickens. As the Guinea-fowl seldom
shows much disposition to incubate if kept under restraint, and
frequently sits too late in the season to rear a brood in this country,
it is a general practice to place her eggs under a common fowl--Game and
Bantams are the best for the purpose. About twenty of the earliest eggs
should be set in May. The Guinea-hen will hatch another brood when she
feels inclined. They sit for twenty-six to twenty-nine or thirty days.
When she sits in due season she generally rears a large brood, twenty
not being an unusual number.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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