Waiting for the guinea fowl to lay their eggs

Plus, if one of them decided this was their time to lamb, their newborn will fare much better under cover than getting a freezing and or sodden start to life in the field.

I have done my bit for the lambs by starting to have a whisky and dry at night before bed. This leaves some empty dry ginger bottles ( not whisky) ready for those pet lambs that will inevitably figure large in our lives and need to be bottle fed. It's a sacrifice I know.

But my new obsession is waiting for the guinea fowls to start laying eggs. It should be any time soon and apart from their eggs being quite delicious to eat, I intend hatching some of their eggs in my latest purchase of ebay. An incubator.

The minute I told friends of my purchase they all said, well some of them; "We've got an incubator you could borrow". But apart from the fact that all the incubators mentioned hold up to a hundred or more eggs, I hate borrowing. "Never a lender or a borrower be" goes the old proverb.

I don't mind lending friends anything, but, I would rather not borrow.

So my new toy can not only hold up to a dozen hen's eggs, but also about eighteen bantam or guinea fowl eggs. Perfect. That way if we find a clutch we can get them in the incubator and then ideally hope for a broody hen to usher them inot the ways of the farmyard once they were hatched. That currently is an impossibility. The fox, or several foxes for all I know, having slaughtered all our pullets from last year. We have seven cockerels left and one rather anxious hen. It's all right being desirable to the male of the species; but seven all at once? Too much.

Miss Farmyard has now gone broody on a nest of her own and gets thoroughly fed up of being chased by all these cockerels every time she gets off the nest to stretch her legs and do what a girl has to do when you have been nest bound all day. So the cockerels are to go, or some of them anyway, to get the odds down a bit. Then I shall either buy, or get given, some fertile eggs for the incubator for now, and then keep a sharp eye out for a guinea fowl nest.

Last year our trio of guinea fowl laid obligingly in the hen house. That is now deserted, but I have left the trap door tantalizingly open and fluffed up their old nesting area. There are still a lot of guinea fowl although gradually diminishing in number as we have the occasional lunch from one of their numbers.

They need to get laying now to save their necks.

Waiting for the guinea fowl to lay their eggs