Unique experiences with guineas around my home
Living in the extremely rural community of Grand Chenier in southern Cameron Parish gave my family the opportunity to experience a more traditional country lifestyle. We raised chickens, rabbits, sheep, cattle, horses and guineas. The sheep and Brahman cattle were primarily raised as part of my children’s active participation in 4-H livestock projects.
Across Cameron Parish, many young people participated in 4-H and FFA, and most competed in highly competitive parish, district and state livestock shows. These programs taught young people responsibility, leadership, animal husbandry and, perhaps most importantly, the significant importance of agriculture to our state’s economy. I have always considered 4-H and FFA to be outstanding youth educational programs that provide valuable learning experiences beyond the traditional classroom.
I grew up in Ville Platte, where our family always had a large chicken yard. Every day, we gathered fresh eggs that were an important part of feeding our family of eight. From time to time, my parents also raised a flock of guineas to supplement our chicken flock.
Most people know how delicious farm-fresh eggs can be and how good a barnyard-raised hen tastes in a chicken and sausage gumbo on a cold winter day. But, in my opinion, even more delicious is a good guinea and smoked sausage gumbo. Guinea meat is entirely dark meat, giving it a rich flavor that is difficult to accurately describe, you simply have to try it!
Guinea fowl are ground-dwelling birds native to Africa that have long been popular as table fare in south Louisiana. While they are especially delicious in a traditional Cajun gumbo with smoked pork sausage, there are other benefits to keeping a flock around your home.
Like chickens, guineas are excellent insect hunters and will eat many of the bugs that people would rather not have around their homes. They will even eat small snakes.
Guineas also make an effective alarm system. They produce incredibly loud, harsh squawking sounds whenever something disturbs the flock. A vehicle pulling into the driveway or someone walking up to your home can quickly set them off. That characteristic can be both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is obvious: They let you know when someone is arriving. The curse is that they make the same racket when family members come home, often creating quite an unnecessary disturbance!
In the mid-1980s, when we decided to raise a flock of guineas at our Grand Chenier homeplace, everyone was excited. My primary motivation was simple: I wanted to recreate some of the fond childhood memories of the delicious guinea and smoked sausage gumbo my mother prepared when I was growing up in Ville Platte.
However, we soon discovered one particular characteristic of guineas: They are avid flyers. Our birds frequently flew over the barnyard fence in search of better opportunities to find insects.
Unfortunately, there was a large streetlight along Highway 82 just a short distance from our home. At certain times of the day, especially in the late afternoon and early morning, large numbers of insects gathered around the light. Naturally, our guineas discovered this all-you-can-eat buffet.
They would fly over the fence, make their way to the highway and spend considerable time feeding beneath the streetlight. Unfortunately, several of them eventually met their fate when trucks traveling along the busy highway could not avoid them.
After losing several birds, we decided it was time to sell the flock. I placed an advertisement in the local newspaper, the Cameron Pilot. Newspaper ads were and continue to be remarkably effective when you have something to sell. Within only a couple of days, a gentleman contacted me and agreed to purchase all 12 of my guineas.
The next day, I delivered the flock in a portable cage to his small barnyard a couple of miles from our home. He paid me, and I considered the matter settled.
About two weeks later, I woke up early one morning and looked out my kitchen window toward our barnyard. To my amazement, several guineas were walking around our livestock feeding trough, happily eating spilled grain.
My first thought was that somehow a nearby neighbor’s flock had found its way into our barnyard. Then I wondered: Could these possibly be the same guineas I had sold only a couple of weeks earlier?
I immediately called the buyer. “How are your guineas doing?” I asked. “Great,” he replied. I then asked him to check his barnyard to make sure they were still there. He put down the phone and went to look. About five minutes later, he returned to the phone. “They're gone!” he said.
I laughed and told him I had just discovered where they were. They had apparently flown several miles back to their original home and were now walking around in my barnyard, right in front of me, eating spilled grain!
I offered to return his money since I had, once again, inherited the guinea flock. He graciously told me not to worry about it and simply said, “Keep them!”
So, I kept the guineas, but not for long. I placed another advertisement in the Cameron Pilot and eventually sold the flock, again, to someone in another town.
This time, however, I made one important change: I clipped their wing feathers so they could not fly back home!
This is certainly another story in the “you can't make this stuff up” category, but it really happened.
Raising farm animals while raising my family in Grand Chenier made life interesting, sometimes challenging and often humorous. My experience with those determined guineas is just one of many memories from those years that I treasure to this day.
Until next time,
Paul Coreil
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