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Despite This We Stay for July 12th, 2012

by Carol Dunn
HUERFANO — For those of you who are looking for a good investment, forget gold and platinum. I’ve found something much more precious and in short supply – guinea fowl.
Yes, those odd, noisy birds are in very short supply around Huerfano, and they are selling at premium prices. I had a fellow in Pueblo tell me I could expect to pay $30 per guinea right now. Of course, he also offered to sell me a Pinto car, so I take that with a grain of salt.
Guineas are the “bird du jour,” and I couldn’t find anyone who had any to sell. They probably gave them away, and I can relate to that.
We had guineas a few years back. They came with the farm. Sure, they eat bugs and kill snakes, but they are just plain weird. When they are on a bug chase, they run like they just robbed a train. And when something scares them, they hunker down and then start shrieking. But their most endearing attribute is serving as a natural alarm clock.
First thing every morning, basically at daybreak, they would make a beeline for the house, position themselves under our bedroom window, and then start shrieking. This is rather unnerving when you are sound asleep. You don’t know if an alien spaceship just landed or if a bee buzzed past. Well, my spouse wasn’t very fond of being awakened by guineas every morning, so we re-gifted them to someone in La Veta. (Yes, sorry, that was us.)
So it’s not for their charm and beauty that I want some guineas. It’s because of those million trillion grasshoppers we have. And when the grasshoppers get to be too plentiful, they take on a mob mentality and become big ugly creepy flying grasshoppers that get in your hair and make you run around in circles screaming like a balloon that got loose from the bunch. Of course, I don’t mean me in particular, I mean other people would do that. We really need some of those shrieking, annoying, bug-eating guineas, like right NOW.
As a last resort, I had to order some little baby guineas, which were in short supply even at the hatchery. They aren’t much bigger than adult grasshoppers at the moment, so it would take a while for them to eat a million trillion of them. Frankly, it’s a lot easier to eat Guinea Chow. They are just learning to shriek, so they sound like squeaky door hinges.
We now have a dozen guineas. If you want one, let me know. When they are finished eating grasshoppers and weigh a hundred pounds, I’m going to be asking a thousand dollars apiece for them. Or best offer.

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