Raising Guinea Fowl

By Kelly Klober
Updated on June 27, 2022
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Adobe Stock/dmussman

For poultry keepers looking beyond the chicken, raising guinea fowl is a more exotic alternative with definite meat-producing possibilities.

A Domesticated Game Bird

The guinea is an option for those seeking an exotic poultry variety. It is a bird virtually unchanged from its wild forebears still found on the plains of Africa. Many will tell you that they really don’t own guineas; they just provide them with some room to roam and a bit of feed and shelter when the snow flies.

Fried young guinea is a regional favorite of the Midwest, seen in late summer and fall when the keets of the year have reached pan size. Guinea is all dark meat of a very rich flavor, and it’s seen on the table very rarely and then only in high-end restaurants. It is a culinary favorite in France, where poultry in great variety is one of the pillars of classic French cuisine.

A few years ago a daytime TV celebrity with an estate home in a state with a history of Lyme disease cases spoke several times of using guineas on her large holding as a natural control measure for ticks. They have a long history of eating ticks and in rural Missouri are said to repel snakes and keep even the fearsome chigger at bay. They also have a well-deserved reputation as feathered watchdogs. They raise a true din when anything intrudes into their territory. If kept in large enough numbers they have even been said to deter winged predators such as hawks.

Their near-wild nature and the propensity to roost in trees make them vulnerable to that winged predator of the night, the owl. An owl will alight next to a guinea roosting on a limb, crowd it off its roosting point, and, as it flutters groundward in the dark, will dive and snatch it away. For those of you who have held on to a relic of your disco-era ways and have a strobe light up in the attic or bought one at a yard sale, it can be given a second life positioned in a poultry yard above the pens and coops. It is said that an owl will not fly through a strobe light.

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