I am certain that the Zandes haven’t classified guinea fowl as an endangered species. They accept them as part of their lives; food, if they are able to snare or shoot them; thieves, if they are in the peanut garden digging up peanuts. I doubt that they are thought of as fascinating birds to watch, a species that must be preserved for our children to enjoy. God made them, so they are there, for the people He made.

On the other hand, my memories of hunting guinea fowl are more about the thrill of the hunt, sneaking up on them to get close enough to kill them. I suppose they would then be called game birds. I had plenty to eat and did not need to kill one in order to eat meat. They do have dark very tasty meat, far better than the chicken breasts found in our stores; that pale, cheap, soft stuff from hybrid birds grown in factories.

My memories of hunting in Africa, my life with the Zandes at Banda, and my efforts to raise guinea fowl here on our little farm, mingle as I wonder how I should view guinea fowl. It’s certain that God created them. It is also evident that they were not designed to survive on a farm in New York, but they do. I think they were made to live in the grasslands somewhere in the tropics.

I was hoping that my guinea fowl would hatch out some little ones, but was surprised when she returned with so many of them! I wanted to help the keets survive, but the mother hen seemed to ignore them and didn’t bother to come back to help when a weaker one was peeping loudly in distress, left behind.

Kestrels heard too, and soon there were no more sounds of distress. I guess that is the way God made kestrels, so why should I interfere? I have heard that those hawks are classified as endangered species.

Here is what I read:

First, you need to know that hawks are protected in the United States under the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 (#16 USC, 703-711). It is illegal to harm them, or to hunt, trap, cage, shoot, or poison them without a permit. Doing so is punishable as a misdemeanor and with fines of up to $15,000.

I guess a normal fine might be only $2,000. Well, I didn’t kill the kestrel, but I did help supply him with food. Is it legal to feed them?

I ended up with eight guinea fowl that survived the winter. I began to wonder how many of those noisy birds should there be on grandpa’s farm, sharing grandma’s garden.

The first nest I discovered was in a back corner of the empty horse stall on the floor. There were already ten eggs when I found it. The shells were very hard, and the eggs small, but they were good, with the yoke a little darker yellow than in chicken eggs. We soon had too many, and though we tried to share them at church there didn’t seem to be much of a demand for the hard little eggs.

By monitoring the number of eggs that showed up each day in that nest, up to eight on some days, I concluded that we had no cock among our birds. It could have been the perfect solution to controlling the size of our flock.

However, when thinking about tick control on his goat farm, our neighbor Jack, had become interested in having some guinea fowl as well. He had three full grown cocks. Would I like to exchange a cock for one of my hens?

Here we were, two farmers, getting into family planning for birds. I couldn’t resist the idea, since farming is all about production and re-production. He had a homemade wire cage and arrived one night with a cock. My birds became acquainted with him while he was still in the cage. I assumed that he would stick around with eight hens available to him, so he was released the next day.

Using the same cage to hold a hen, I caught one that night. She was easy to catch as she slept on her perch. Ellen held a small flashlight for me and closed the cage opening after I stuffed the bird inside. Soon all was quiet again. This was going to be easy. I took the hen to Jack.

I kept removing eggs from the empty horse stall, leaving a few nest eggs to keep them coming back to lay more. They weren’t fertile anyway so I took away all the eggs when one hen started setting on the nest. Maybe they would give up and lay fertile eggs somewhere else, now that the cock was with them. We were managing the population rather well.

Jack called, and asked if my hen had come back home, because the one I had given him had disappeared. I gladly offered him another. I had too many anyway. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but he could hear my birds when they called to each other while they were roaming in the field across the road. It was a little trickier the third time, since the next hen fought the cage, forced herself out through the wire and flew away. I tried again with a cage we used to take the cat to the vet. The remaining birds began roosting in a tree near the barn.

Lots of grandkids visited during the busy summer and we occasionally counted the wandering guinea fowl, usually less than the number I thought I still had. Our granddaughter, Rethy, visited from California, so we bought a goat from Jack adding another animal on grandpa’s farm for her to enjoy. Micah, our grandson was just learning to talk, and wanted grandpa to take him into the barn to see Zack the horse, the laying hens, the Banty hen with her four chicks, the goat, the cats and the “kak, ka, Kaak” which were, of course, the guinea fowl.

I speculated that the reduced number of guinea fowl meant that they had gone off somewhere to nest. While cutting weeds along Zack’s pasture fence I uncovered a huge nest of guinea fowl eggs, containing over thirty eggs! No way I wanted all those to hatch! Then I discovered another when mowing down old hay for bedding with probably 20 eggs in it. Removing tall weeds around the back barn I found yet another! I discovered over seventy eggs had already been laid! They might all be fertile and there were probably more!

I felt a little guilty destroying so many eggs but eating them all wasn’t an option and I had no idea how old they were. Maybe I could limit the birds to one or two keets each, by leaving a few eggs in each clutch. It is fun to watch the little ones grow. My mowing that uncovered the well concealed nests caused the huge nest to be deserted. A scattering of speckled feathers at the second nest site on the hillside gave evidence that something else had discovered the hen on her eggs and that one was abandoned.

It turned out that the nest behind the ladder by the barn was not abandoned. A hen and sometimes two retuned and began setting in the open. I left 10 eggs to see what would happen. I was rather enjoying managing my guinea fowl and even took Micah to see them hiding, flat and low, absolutely still, in plain sight.

A woodchuck had also moved in less than two feet away to dig out his secret home behind the weeds under the barn. He refused to move out even when I filled the entrance to his cave with rocks. One of the hens gave up. Somehow the egg count got up to 22 eggs. And day after day the two neighbors were living peacefully side by side.

This was my farm and I didn’t want a woodchuck digging around under the barn. He would have to go. Both the woodchuck and the setting guinea fowl may have been watching as I set the “Have a Heart” live trap and baited it with fresh produce from Ellen’s garden. To the woodchuck, the pea vines, with peas in the pods, were evidently more attractive than the lush grass growing back where I had just cut it. Drowning would have permanently moved him out, but instead I “had a heart” and released him on the far side of a nearby stream and filled up the entrance to his hole.

That move was only temporary. He came back. His freshly landscaped entrance showed the improvements he had made. He exhibited no interest in his former mobile home with the new improved bait I offered. His beady eye looked back at me when I got down low to peek into his cave under my barn. He was not welcome and had no building permit. I could easily catch him with a steel-jawed leg trap and then shoot him. I placed the trap anchor ring down over the top of a short steel pipe that had once been used as an electrical grounding point for the barn. I left the trap in his newly excavated doorway.

The next morning the trap was gone. The setting hen was gone. I couldn’t find the woodchuck. There was no way the woodchuck could have gone straight up and lifted the ring off that pipe. I was totally mystified. The next two days it rained and the clutch of eggs lay exposed to the cold weather. Any life in them had certainly died.

I heard from my son Jeff that Jack’s two guinea hens had reappeared; first one followed by fourteen keets and then the other with twenty-four a few days later. I was able to find only four guinea fowl still wandering around on my small farm. When this story started, he had wanted more guinea fowl and I had thought I had plenty when I had eight. Was either of us satisfied with the outcome of our management efforts? Are we in charge of the animals we have?

It is true that our creator placed man in the garden of Eden to dress and keep it. He said “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

I find it very interesting that one can be fined $15,000 for killing a red-tailed hawk. Dominion certainly means to have power, authority and control and it was part of the plan when we were created that man have such dominion. What would my fine be if I were to kill that groundhog who was digging under my barn? Was it OK for the kestrel hawk to kill my keets? Parables are supposed to be stories with some kind of spiritual lesson or a moral.

Well, that wasn’t yet the end of the story. I did find the trap and I have seen the groundhog back in his hole under the barn after my second effort to trap him.

Several days later, I was feeding the variety of living things on my farm and threw some chicken feed pellets on the barn floor for the guinea fowl and banties. A guinea fowl came flopping into the barn and began pecking at the food. She was dragging the missing trap, still clamped to her mangled, nearly severed, leg.

I was able to catch her in the corner of the barn. My left knee protested as usual when I squatted down while pressing on the strong spring with my right foot to open the trap and release her. She was strangely still as I worked.

It wasn’t many days later when I was in my garden using my International 225 Hay Swather to cut down the dead stalks. It was then that I found yet another guinea fowl nest. The weeds and the fallen cornstalks had made a perfect hiding place for the hen. She escaped the sickle bar cutting blades and the rotating reel but her nest, with 18 eggs in it, was totally exposed when I backed up. Amazingly, she didn’t abandon the nest but came back to settle down over the eggs, an almost flat speckled black lump, on the brown garden soil; her red and white, helmeted head absolutely still. Only her eyes moved as she watched Micah, Tonka, and I, watch her.

Several days later, all I found was a puff of drifting guinea fowl feathers from her back. She had been found. The egg I opened held a partially developed dead keet.

What do we do with the dominion we have been given over God’s creation? The Zande, the sportsman, and the two farmers each treated the guinea fowl differently.

Are there those who would use the mandate to have dominion over God’s creatures as their license to dominate other people?