Lets talk about Guinea Hens (Raising Keets)

[Music] so we got going here b hi everybody well we've got some new guineas hopefully this will be the last batch for the season um we've been hacking a lot of guineas or not necessarily me but the guineas have been hatching a lot of guineas and we had our last skinny that was sitting on eggs was um she was she hatched about 15 of the guineas and then the ants started getting them so i pulled out the rest of the eggs i've got about 18 eggs in our incubator right now and this is some of them that i managed to save i don't know what happened to the guinea she should have or he should have about four guineas left that are with him i found four of them this morning just kind of out in the middle of the pasture and i'm not sure where daddy and mommy are at but so i've already hatched one guinea from the eggs and it's it's this skinny right here and if you notice as i was watching her last night after she hatched she was having a hard time bringing her legs together so i took some um pipe cleaner and put them around her legs and hopefully in just a couple of days because her feet are normal her feet are fine she just doesn't have as much of the strength this is one of the guineas this one had already cracked open and there were a couple ants um in there that i got out and she shortly hatched after that so she's my little baby i'm gonna they were not happy unfortunately they were the guineas were with mom and dad for a couple days so you can hear them screaming they're calling for them we had these ones in this black bin in the house and i had my last batch of guineas that i had taken from the daddy because some they do something awfully worth weird they don't make the best parents and then if they start to get behind and it's almost 100 degrees here right now the guineas just take off and they just go i mean if you have guineas you know how fast they are and uh if these little ones can't keep up then they get their little stragglers and the other guineas start pecking at them so i've noticed a couple of them were already pecked at and i know from the two other batches that i had that they can survive but from the last batch that i had taken the rest of the guineas from from their mom and dad they they actually died of heartbreak sad to say um so they're screaming now so i'm hoping that putting them outside in the cage so eric and i uh well aiden eric and i aiden had already kind of set up with chicken wire this cage over here uh for the last batch that we had and it actually worked out really well i had two little juvenile guineas that took to the babies that were all in here and basically mothered them as though they were their own they slept on here every night and just watched over them and um we had a bunch of guineas from that one we've got about 13 guineas right now let's see if daddy and the other ones made it maybe a little bit less last year we didn't lose any guineas except for one in a lightning storm this year we've i've already lost at least seven of the guineas that i had hatched and it's not because of uh it's it's not because of they weren't um what's the word for it what's the word for when an animal isn't i mean they it wasn't that they couldn't live it's that something actually got them yeah we got a couple dogs that are we're still working on they keep stealing a few yeah and i think one of our dogs our other one's really good she doesn't touch anything they do a really good job of guarding our livestock but they did get to one of my little guineas we went on vacation and came back and seven or eight of them were gone so yeah so i'm going to start putting my guineas and we got two little magpie uh deathwings in here also that we got from the tractor supply yesterday they were the last two so i decided that i'd take them so and they're going to grow up with these guineas and all my ducks have actually grown up with guinea okay here we go so you can see eric do you want to look at this one you can see she's actually standing up now so she wasn't standing up all last night after she hatched but she's standing and she's walking i'm so excited so i'll i'll test her out in a couple days and see how she's doing all right [Music] they are pretty young all right so we're gonna have to do a double double layer of this chicken wire they've already figured it out smart little ones oh they're all out over there on the other side oh goodness they're gonna have to go back in the box first all right okay well we tried a couple days a couple more days you'll have to go back in the box until they get a little bigger and then we can put them in here suck it in buddy got one over here making a run for it yeah can you come over here and come grab these they're making their way out maybe stand there make sure they don't keep trying to get out there there we go [Music] i told you you belonged in a cage [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh now my guesses are trying to get out oh yeah yeah they're too big they're too big grab them put them in oh come on little one okay i got you all right so i think we just covered them in here and leave them out here can you leave the ducks by themselves and i think that'll still be happy and the duckies will be happy because the duckies will have them around them yep at first you don't succeed couple more days they'll be big enough not to fit through there yeah yeah absolutely so we've got uh how many guns we have left about 14 um well hopefully if daddy's around still i'm just hiding his skinnies um we should have 14 so we want we want a few more they're great we don't have any snakes around here hardly and all of our neighbors have snakes so we got copperheads and rattlers and so we're real lucky i think the guineas play a big part of that between the cats the guineas and the dogs and the ducks and the chickens yeah they keep most of the snakes away and they eat a lot of bugs so these guys wander around the pasture all day long just eating bugs so believe it or not that helps a lot so guineas uh that's why we try to have a lot keep a lot of guineas around as annoying as they are and they're so low maintenance and we've we've got our guineas trained now to where they they in the morning when they see me they come running up to the chicken house because they'll fly out from our chicken house our chicken house isn't covered only the houses where the chickens stay so our guineas actually roost up on the edge of of the pole top of the greenhouse or on the top of the bar they when they see me so they'll go out in the morning by time i come out they're ready for their scratch so i'll throw them out from scratch with the rest of the chickens and i do the same thing in the evening and it's been over a year now and none of our guineas have ever left uh our property which a lot of people have that problem yeah we were we were expecting once we got them that we'd lose them within a few months because that's what everybody told us but they've all stayed yeah and they've multiplied like crazy yeah and uh we've given some to some neighbors and unfortunately they've taken off so yeah they seem to like it here yeah lots of bugs maybe i don't know maybe they our grasshopper count is definitely down yep they'll go after the grasshoppers and we had a funny thing we had some chickens that hatched as well and a couple of them are roosters that we're trying to get rid of but the roosters went out to the pasture and started playing and play fighting the guineas got all excited and they came around watching and it was the most hilarious thing i tell you people the guineas are such a hoot to watch and um yeah they all started there was five of them and they were all fighting just like the roosters yeah they look like roosters they all got involved and and they were just sitting there doing the exact same thing that the roosters were doing they they just had a fun time so they're a lot of fun they're they're very low maintenance uh way lower than my chickens or my ducks are and uh they take care of ticks and wings we have friends that had a that have had a bunch of fleas at this time right now just because it's so hot and humid the fleas are really enjoying it out here and um we haven't had a problem with much of anything other than we've got a huge fly problem well that's because of the cows yeah that's because of the cows but orchard is not looking so good back there b you need to let the cows in there to eat the grass yeah well we're gonna do that today oh my gosh i think i might see babies no oh i don't know without my glasses i can't they tend to split up into a couple groups they're just sunbathing you sure that's the one oh no that's a big one no those are the same ones i'm not exactly sure what our guineas all tend to split up into a couple groups and they'll be roaming different parts of the property there's two over there in the orchard i don't know if you can see them yeah it depends on on when they hatch so we've got daddy who ended up raising three guineas but again we left on our trip and we came back to only one guinea left and he roams with the main pack of guineas they're all right here you can see the little juvenile one and then my other juvenile ones that i raised they all roam together as well and i found it really interesting yesterday after the mom and the dad hatched or had their they actually had 10 guineas that were all running around them the four just came right up and the other guineas didn't seem to mind them being there they were hanging around all the babies and just just uh just wonderful to see of course they're they're like bulls in a china shop what are they doing over there jumping all over the place too they're bathing digging holes in our pastures what they're doing yeah they're fading bathing in the dirt chasing them i found a good patch of sandy alone oh i yeah so that's about it with our guineas if you want any any other information or you have any comments or suggestions about how we can handle them it was a big loss this summer we had four nests at the guineas and if you don't know guineas they lay about 30 35 eggs to a nest so that's a lot of guineas a lot of lost skinny babies um that that didn't survive so this was our first experience hatching guineas the ones that i hatched in the incubator that we had stolen from their nests those all did really great and we gave those a bunch of those away and they're thriving they're doing wonderful but once those guineas um have our knife out in the open with the other guineas they they seem to have a they seem to have a problem after that so if you have any suggestions if you have guineas yourself i sure would love to hear about it because it was a heartbreaking year for guinea loss yeah we seem to lose one baby a day there'd be 10 of them one day the next day there'd be nine the next day there'd be eight yeah uh babies so it's i don't know if it was cats getting them but i don't think so because the guineas are pretty hardcore they attack the cats oh yeah they had our dogs running with the tails between their legs trying to protect those guineas so uh if you have any suggestions uh please leave them in the comments and if you if you feel uh led to like and subscribe to our our uh face our youtube page we sure would appreciate that lazy acres texas thanks y'all have a great day

Channel: LazyAcresTexas

Views: 4,615

Rating: 4.8873239 out of 5

Keywords: keets and discussing raising Guinea Hens free range, Keets, Guinea Hens, Guineas, Free range, New Ducklings, baby Keets, Baby Guineas, Small farm

Id: Cvs2mEDyg8U

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020