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We never intended to try hatching eggs, mostly because excess roosters means culling, if you can’t find a home for them. :( But then a number of things happened:

• Squeak gets picked on by all the other birds and looks terrible, and always ends up injured if we keep her in the coop. She is living in a cage in the kitchen until the chickens can be outside more (giving her escape room)
• She has been broody for about a week, not laying eggs and not budging from the nestbox (except to eat once and to lay down a gigantic barn-burner)
• One of the guinea hens started laying last week, unexpectedly (we didn’t expect any til summer)
• You can’t get guineas sexed, so even if we were to buy from a hatchery we’d get a straight run
• We had hoped to get a few more guineas, but the minimum hatchery order is usually 30 keets and we don’t want that many; neither does anyone we know

We waited until there were 5 eggs (after eating the first 2), storing them on a shelf in the TV room, then stuck them under Squeak tonight. She seemed surprised but delighted by this turn of events, clucking and looking underneath herself, then shifting them around as we slipped each egg under her chest.

We have low expectations of getting keets or maybe guins. Red enthusiastically mates with the guineas, but hybrids have a low hatching or survival rate. Meanwhile, Handlebah (the guinea cock) is enthusiastic yet ineffective with the hens, usually running at them full speed and then stopping just short, and nothing else. Not apparently a hen’s idea of romance.

Assuming any do hatch, they’re due right around Easter. Even if nothing hatches, we hope not to get rotten eggs breaking open before them. Guinea eggshells are incredibly thick, making them hard to candle but hopefully less likely to break prematurely. Even if we get no keets, at least Squeaky gets to sit on some eggs for awhile.

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