Okay, now that I got your attention, I have a question. Thia morning when 11 year old went out to take care of the animals, he came back in to tell us that the turkey (female) and one of the guinea hens (male) were fighting. He was on top of her biting her head, her neck was scratched and bleeding and she was just tucking her head trying to get away from him. Was he attempting to mate? He has 3 females of his own species. I had my son catch him (not easy). We put him and one female in another pen with some Barred Rocks. Now he just paces along the fence yelling towards his old home. The turkey "mothered" the guineas since they were little tykes. She is fine this afternoon, no big wounds or anything..help me out here someone.

-- Cheri in NY (t.asprion@worldnet.att.net), March 12, 2002

Answers

Mating - or attempting to. If they were fighting they'd be face to face.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), March 12, 2002.

My guinea hen , crossed that road many times, and I remember two hybrids of them with chicken, they were very different, and they were always by themselves, never mated with the others, I had them for five years, and I never got eggs from them or nothing, they were like asexual, when they died, we found out that one was a male and the other a female. Hybrids, probably steril... Weird, Weird, weird....

-- Ralph Roces (rroces1@yahoo.com), March 12, 2002.

When I was about 18 years old I was working with a electrical contractor who raised guinneas and chickens. One day when we were at his house one of his guinneas was roughing up a chicken. My boss caught the guinnea and asked me if I wanted it, he said he was getting tired of it attacking all his chickens. So I told him yeah I will take it. I took it and gave it to my Uncle who had chickens and guinneas. After a couple of weeks I asked my Uncle how his new guinnea was doing and he told me that they had ate it. He said it was the horniest guinnea he had ever seen. He said it would just continuesly keep trying to mate with all his chickens and was beating them up pretty bad in the process so they decided to eat him.

So this might be what is trying to do with your turkey!

-- r.h. in okla. (rhays@sstelco.com), March 13, 2002.