Go Ahead, Get Guineas
(Page 2 of 4)
October/November 2003
By Nancy Smith
Common helmeted guineas, Numida meleagris, are recog nized widely in folk history for their effectiveness in reducing populations of ticks and other insects. In 1992, a scientific study headed by researcher David Cameron Duffy confirmed the anecdotal evidence by finding a "highly significant difference in tick presence in response to guinea fowl activity."
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Duffy, now a professor of botany at the University of Hawaii, says the study, conducted in New York, showed that guineas would perform tick patrol at the perimeter of a field or lawn despite their instinct to avoid brushy borders and the predators that lurk there. Ticks will venture about a yard out from the brush, but beyond that point, lawns generally are much too hot and dry.
Duffy says guineas can be most effective against ticks as part of an integrated pest management program that includes regular removal of leaf litter, which is a tick's favorite home. (Results of the guinea study were widely reported, including in the New York Times and Time magazine, and in The Wilson Bulletin of the Wilson Ornithological Society, which now has the study archived and on line at http://elibrary.unm.edu/wilson/ .) Model Christie Brinkley is credited along with Duffy and another researcher, Randall Downer, for the work; Duffy says Brinkley, concerned about her young daughter's safety, actually helped initiate the project through her congressman after she heard some of the anecdotal evidence about guineas and tick control.
Because ticks have been identified as vectors of Lyme and other diseases, more people are looking for ways to control them and giving guineas a try. Ralph Winter owns and operates the Guinea Farm in New Vienna, Iowa, the largest guinea fowl hatchery of fancy varieties in the world, with a breeding flock of 2,600 birds in 23 different colors ( www.guineafarm.com ). Every Tuesday from mid-May to mid-October, he hatches and ships out 5,000 baby guineas, called keets.
In the last 10 years, Winter's business has tripled, "especially on the East Coast, the main deer tick area." Most of the buyers want the birds for bug control. Before Lyme Disease was discovered, people bought guineas to eliminate dog ticks on their pets, grasshoppers from their gardens, fire ants from their lawns or flies from their stables. "Guineas will eat 'em all," he says.
Twenty years ago, Ferguson bought guineas to rid her garden of Japanese beetles and grasshoppers. She says she just wanted some decent flowers to enter in her garden club competitions. The guineas did that for her—since their arrival, she has won more than 100 prize ribbons for her now-perfect blooms—and they ate their way through her tick population, too. "Ticks were thick here," she says of her 14-acre country home site.
