I'm trying to be funny with this 'story' I wrote yesterday about the scourge of our neighbourhood (no, not me!), the flock of Guinea fowl that are foul indeed. It's longer than my usual quick hit (see previous post) and if you have the patience to read it, I'd enjoy any feed back.
Is there a bird more irritating than the Guinea fowl? Blackbirds scatter mulch everywhere and that's annoying. Muscovy Ducks with their juicy splurts of toe-seeking poo, and pea-brained roosters that yodel when decent folk are still 3 hours from throwing off their cosy duvets and greeting the day are very annoying too but Guinea fowl make those feathered fiends look and sound like amateurs! They're the Kings of Raucous . Or Queens, I don't know if it's the cocks or hens that are making the lunatic noises that make visitors to my garden wonder aloud if there's an asylum nearby, perhaps it's both. Maybe the chicks are in their too, squawking away at the top of their seemingly enormous lungs. Either way, Guinea fowl are the fingernails on the blackboard of the bird world. The coven of Guinea fowl (it'd be a 'coven' wouldn't it, not a 'parliament' as with owls, or a goosey 'gaggle' but something more sinister I'm sure.) that rends the air in our neighbourhood must be feeding on coffee beans; they're relentless and manic, like someone who's had too many cups of the stimulant. These birds never cease their screeching, seeming not to breathe even. They saw away at the silence with a voice that sounds just like a rusty hinge on a door being opened and closed, opened and closed, by a bored village idiot - screech, scrawk, screech, scrawk! tirelessly eroding my peace of mind and that, I suppose, of all my neighbours though I've heard no complaints about the fiendish flock. Perhaps everyone around me has installed plugs into their ears and are going about their business blissfully unaware of the cacophany that's shredding the neighbourhood serenity.
What can I do? I could talk with the Guinea fowl-herd and ask him to put them in his pot but I don't think he would and I'm not sure I could maintain my composure when he said so. Releasing stoats in the vicinity of the fowl run would be elegant, but I've not a single stoat. The blasted birds are reknown for their alarm-raising anyway, so I'd not get anywhere near them before they did their banshee thing. Poisoned grain suspended from a helium balloon? It'd need a sou'easter, rare enough down here, and an air rifle, which, like the stoat, I don't have, much in the same way that I don't have a snake or a bird-eating spider. I kind-of desperate. Perhaps I'll have to accept my fate and learn to tolerate the hack-sawing background to my otherwise idyllic country life. Or not. All suggestions gratefully received.
Of course I do comfort myself with the thought that it could be worse and it has been in the past. I had a firewood merchant living next door for many years. His circular saws beat the Guinea fowl hands-down, until the Council Inspector of Sounds served him a notice to desist. When we first moved here, we found the bleating of newly weaned lambs in the paddock on the other side of our boundary fence kept us awake half the night but that was only once or twice a year and was part of the deal of living on the town-country border and more a novelty than an annoyance.
I have read though, that Guinea fowl are excellent for controlling ticks. If ever Southland suffers an infestation of those unlovely insects, I might regret my criticism of the birds. Snakes too are reputedly repelled by the fowls, much as I am, and I may again be grateful to them if serpents ever invade our green and pleasant region. Got to look on the bright side I suppose. For the moment, the birds are silent. It's snowing and they don't seem to like that. Now there's a thought … a weather machine!
I'll talk to my people.
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