The other morning, as the sun broke the horizon, Sharon came upstairs with tears in her eyes. One of our seven caged guinea fowl lay dead in its cage. By the way, the proper term for young guinea fowl is “keets.”
I went out to check. Not one, but three were dead. I will spare you the forensic details of what happened to the guineas, but let me just say a racoon family is resting fat and happy.
To spare the lives of the surviving members of the guinea tribe, we made some significant changes to the way we housed our precious little fowl. Change happens when you suffer a loss.
I have learned many things from my little guinea friends. Their looks? They are interesting fowl to say the least. They have a small unattractive head, with a significantly larger body. In the face of danger, they run about as fast as they fly and cover about the same amount of ground.
Guineas are known to be a living alarm system. When critters or guests show up at your home, the whole guinea tribe collectively begins to loudly announce their presence with their unique squawk, or talk, or whatever you would call the noise they make.
These birds also are very helpful to those who live in the country because they love to eat ticks and chiggers. They knock a sizeable dent in the population of these insects. I have also observed they eat the bugs off garden veggies. I also noted how they eat both poison ivy and clover.
Snakes detest these birds. Guineas have no fear of snakes. If they find a snake, the guineas circle up and hold some form of a committee or fowl convention to talk about what to do with the reptile. While the guineas appear to be discussing the fate of the snake, he will most often slither away and relinquish ownership of his hunting ground to the fowl. Besides annoying a snake and chasing one away, guineas have also been known to collectively extinguish a snake.
I discovered some unique behavioral patterns of guineas:
1. They work as a collective to spook off potential danger. They cease what they are individually doing to process a larger threat. Wouldn’t that be a good habit for Southern Baptists to learn?
As we learn from International Mission Board data, our greatest problem/threat in the world today is “lostness.” Lost people act like lost people and threaten to infect the whole culture, jurisdiction, or tribe with behavior that is broken, rejected, and relationally polluted.
What would happen if we collectively paused our quest for individuality and theological superiority and collaborated with others on the biblical basics to strategically conquer lostness in our generation?
2. When guineas lose their sense of danger and feel secure, they become more selfish. For example, when Sharon takes some of the radishes that only produced stalks instead of fruit and tosses the greens in the cage, the formerly sanguine collective of fowl become poster children of doing what they selfishly want to do without concern for others.
I can bear witness of multiple keets grabbing a radish stalk and running away from the group. Their peep changes to a “me, me, mine, mine.” I think that’s similar behavior of some toddlers who claim a new toy in the nursery with a “me” or a “mine.” The same can happen with adults who think that “my way is the only way.” Or “smack talk appears acceptable on a Twitter feed” when disagreeing with somebody, even a family member, like a church family member – a brother or sister in Christ.
There are many other observations beyond the two items mentioned above. They too could be illustrations of human behavior. What if the take away from the great guinea massacre is learning the value of one another. Every soul of a lost person has value. Every living Christ-follower has eternal, royal value in God’s kingdom. They deserve respect, honor, and the opportunity to fulfill their mission for the glory of God.