I enjoy the antics of our three dozen barnyard chickens. I chuckle at the truths behind the “chicken” expressions in our language: “Chickens come home …. You’re too chicken to do that … Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.”

Today’s column is not about chickens. It is about guinea fowl.

Guinea fowl are rounder, goofier cousins of chickens. They eat ticks. My poor wife’s tick-borne Lyme disease has not fully responded to antibiotic treatment. She suffers. So she is thrilled at the idea of tick-eating fowl.

We decided to experiment. We got 16 newborn guinea fowl in spring.

I immediately made my first mistake.

“We’ll raise them in with the baby chicks,” I said. They were of about the same size. They ate the same stuff. So, why not?

That would have been OK for a month or so. In our ignorance, we kept them with young and grown chickens for three months before turning them loose to roam the yard, eating ticks, snakes, mice, and bugs, and to roost in our trees, feeding themselves at no cost to us.

Hah.

They think they are chickens.

I shoo them out. They fly back into the chickens’ outdoor runs and run back into the chicken house, gobbling chicken feed.

Worse, they make fingers-on-blackboard noises, sounding like screeching hinges on rusty gates, the whole flock at once.

That gets on my nerves a bit. It gets on the chickens’ nerves a lot. The guineas, more aggressive, bully the chickens, pulling out their tail and back feathers to assert dominance in the pecking order. The stressed chickens slow down their egg production.

By summer’s end, we had guineas that thought they were chickens. We had fewer eggs, much more work and much more noise.

Each morning, it took a half-hour to tease the guineas outside with grain, or shoo them outside by waving my hat.

Guineas do not “herd” easily. They are quicker scamperers than chickens. They have nasty claws that leave deep scratches. Unlike chickens, they do not go limp when held upside down by the legs. Instead, they use their powerful wings to beat the bejabers out of the person holding them. Getting guineas anywhere is more work than it is with chickens.

Eventually, I would get them outside.

A half-hour later, the guineas would fly back over the fence and into the outside run, then scamper back inside the chicken house to rob the chickens of the remnants of their scratch grain.

But the guineas’ worst quality is this: They are incredibly stupid. It takes a lot of stupidity to make a chicken look smart. Guineas do that. They get aggressive at a falling leaf. They scatter at the wind. They screech when lonesome, but can’t find each other from six feet away.

“Dumb!” I muttered, while feeding guineas in the company of grandson Wyatt. Wyatt, who is five, is working out the proper ways to speak to and about people. So, I heard, from behind my back, a soft preschooler voice whispering, “Dumb is a bad word. You shouldn’t say ‘dumb.’ Dumb is a bad word…”

Ah. A teaching moment.

Yes, I said, “dumb” is a not-nice word. We should not call other people dumb; it makes them feel bad. But guineas’ brains are the size of peas. Guineas do not understand English. You can call guineas dumb.

Wyatt smiled. A glint of forbidden fun shone in his eyes.

The next morning, we shooed guineas again. “Dumb! I muttered.

From behind my back, I heard, softly, “Dumb! Dumb guineas! Guineas dumb. Dumb-de-dumb-dumb!”

The boy learned.

But the guineas won’t learn.

What to do?

Eureka! My wife’s sister and her husband love guineas. Their flock has been reduced to one. They live just a mile away. “Yes!” they said. I did not ask twice.

Outside, guineas are uncatchable. Within the closed-in coop, catching guineas required teamwork with my wife. One of us used a large fish-landing net, the size used to bring walleyes into a boat. The other stood a dog crate on end so the door was on top, opened it to accept each netted guinea, then slammed it down quickly so the previous captives didn’t fly out.

Repeat. Catch, or try to catch. Bump into things. Bump into each other. Raise choking clouds of chicken house dust. Say colorful phrases. Laugh a lot.

Snag! Open! Shove! Slam!

Eventually, it worked. At Rusty and Claire’s Quiet Creek acres, the guineas prosper. With no coop to seek, they adapt to nighttime roosting in trees or seeking cover in tall grasses. The wooded surroundings at Quiet Creek make them less visible to predatory hawks than they were in our open fields.

So the experiment ends, not in failure, but with education.

Yes, almost all birds have feathers.

But guineas’ feathers are not like chickens’ feathers.

And birds of a feather… Well, you know the rest. That is yet another chicken truth.

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Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net