Our first hiccup at this house-sit

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I’ve written about some of the challenges we’ve faced when house-sitting, and I’ve also said that I always expect to have a hiccup or two at each place. We had one of those hiccups today. There is a hen sitting on guinea fowl eggs with a guinea hen sharing nesting duties. Not really an ideal situation but they’re not our chooks (chickens). We didn’t expect the eggs to hatch out while we were here but when we went across this evening, we discovered the hen off the nest with 17 – I kid you not – 17 little guinea fowl chicks. We needed to catch the hen to lift her into a small pen which doesn’t have a gate. She is quite vicious and very intent on protecting her chicks. Luckily, we had gloves. She made her stance under some cupboards so was exceedingly difficult to extract. To cut a long story short, after a lot of trouble, we managed to put her into the pen but then we had 17 little chicks to try to catch. Last time we were here we had a slightly similar situation but the little chicks just squatted in a heap and we were able to catch them quite easily. This time, they were running in all directions. Some went charging off with the guinea hen; some went behind the small cage where we had no hope of getting them out and the rest were helter-skelter all over the place. Eventually we managed to catch them all and put them with the hen. We then headed home for a well-earned beer. Although it might be cold in the northern hemisphere, it’s hot here so a cold beer/shandy went down well. The photo was not taken at this place.