I purchased a lavender female in the summer and was given a brown male. they free range. She laid eggs in August and hatched 11 keets. I kept them confined for three weeks and let them loose. its December and I'm have five plus the parents (lost some to resident hawks and a bald eagle). at least one offspring is female. is there concern If the offspring breed amongst themselves next year? also, to share my experience, I have not had a problem with noise like some others. they call for each other and if threatened. once my pit terrier mix was causing a ruckus with them and when I got there the dog was running for his life with mom and dad guinea chasing him at full speed and voice, but most of the time they are usually not noisy. they live mostly in 330' by 60' garden surrounded by electric fence. they have part of shed and roost in it at night. they wander out of garden to rest of yard (3.5 acres) and surrounding farmland (nearest house 1,000 Ft). they like to look at their reflection in my basement windows. In warmer weather they would roost in tree near house. my chickens are in tractor in garden and guinea dad does seem to torment them by running up to wire mesh and scaring them. I have had chickens get loose and never saw any problem with guineas. they are not far from the road but I never saw them in the street. I feed a corn type crumbles for game birds at night or whenever I get into the garden. they follow me when they think they are getting fed. they drink from drippers (although chickens wont). I showed one guinea how to drink and they all seemed to figure it out.

I, too, have some guinea eggs incubating. I hoping to increase my flock size from 4 to about 20. My 4 are very friendly. I hope adding more will not screw things up. Guineas are much better than my silly chickens. They don't scratch up plants. They do love the bugs though. I don't suppose they know the difference between good bugs and bad bugs though. The chickens just make a mess of the flower beds. To make it worse, something got all my hens so all I have left is three roosters too old for stew.

We've got one guinea fowl running with our hens. He is the LOUDEST bird I've heard! Louder than peacocks and macaws. He screeches whenever he sees anything unfamiliar so if you get a new gardening hat, you'll hear about it. Speckles - the guinea fowl - is kinda fun to watch, he zooms around the place a lot more than the chickens and charges at the dogs (border collies will herd chickens) to keep them away from "his" girls. He has nice polka dotted feathers, too. Sometimes he will roost in the avocado tree and screech about having to be by himself, but more frequently now he roosts in the hen house in a much quieter fashion. Which is a good thing since roast guinea fowl is really tasty and if he gets to be much more of a pest, that will solve any guinea problems.

Ada, I love guineas and have had them for many years, but would never try to keep them in a suburban environment. There is just no way it is going to work out well. Guineas are the loudest creatures on the face of the earth and even if your neighbors agree ahead of time that it is OK with them if you have guineas, I bet they'll change their mind when they hear them. We've had them every year except this year, because predators wiped out our 30 last year along with most the other poultry in our neighborhood and we decided to skip having them this year in the hope that the predators would move on. (They haven't.) Our guineas ate ticks but preferred grasshoppers and would chase them endlessly. Our chickens stick closer to the house and eat ticks as well. If you have guineas (or any other game birds or poultry) you have to have a coop for them that is predator proof because everything under the sun will attemp to kill them, and often succeed, including dogs, raccoons, bobcats, foxes, coyotes, ringtail cats, and hawks. Some snakes will kill keats and half-grown guineas. Guineas will make a racket and squawk any time something they're 'used to' changes or is out of place, so they'll alert you every time an animal walks across the yard, etc. and they'll have a fit and treat your husband like an invading stranger if he does something drastic like shaving off his mustache or getting contacts instead of wearing glasses. They like for things to stay exactly the same and don't handle change well. They'll run right out into traffic when they're chasing a grasshopper and you'll lose some that way, and you can be legally liable for vehicle damage if the guineas cause a vehicle accident. Our guineas did keep our property pretty much tick-free and grasshopper-free, but then the dogs and cats would run wild through the pastures next door and bring home ticks on them, so even though we might have been 98% tick-free, we were never 100% tick-free. Even though the guineas have been gone for about a year, we still haven't had ticks return, unless the chickens have been eating them. I'm not seeing ticks on our dogs and cats though. Our guineas were locked in a predator-proof coop at night, although it took us a few years to make it 100% predator-proof, and we could keep them inside a covered chicken run during the day if we didn't want them roaming because a bobcat or fox or whatever was around. However, once they are used to being allowed to leave the fenced area, they aren't happy being cooped up and scream and yell all day for you to come let them out. One option that no one has mentioned is a chicken tractor. If you made a very lightweight chicken tractor, you could drag it to a new spot every day and let them work that area and then drag it to a new spot the next day. While purchased chicken tractors are very expensive, you can make your own pretty easily and fairly inexpensively. I've linked a website below set up by a woman to show many different versions of the chicken tractor. If you google 'chicken tractor' you'll find everything from books to detailed plans to YouTube how-to videos. If you're at home during the day, you can move the chicken tractor every hour or two and they'd cover more ground that way, but they still will be very loud. And, yes, you need to raise them from keats or they'll leave your place and try to "go home" even if home is 100 miles away. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Chicken Tractors