Guinea Fowl, Chapter 2, “Only one is useless.”

To prevent my life goal from being “useless” I decide to buy a female guinea fowl as soon as I return from a trip to the bank in Basse. Before I leave for Basse, I tell the kid I will buy a second guinea fowl, a female, as soon as I go to Basse and get money from the bank. He is pleased to hear this, and promises it will be caught. And that is how, a week later, Prunella Josefina Marzipan Cunningham came to join her husband, Ira Cornelius Peabody Cunningham.

Unfortunately, I am not entirely convinced that Prunella, is, in fact, female. When I went over to Camara Kunda to buy “her” the kid asked, “You need a male, no?” to which I replied, “No, it was a male you gave me before” to which he replied something along the lines of yes, that’s right, that’s what I’d meant to say. I wasn’t convinced.

“This one is a female?”

“Yes, yes.”

“She” is pulled out of a cage and brought over. Another kid flips her upside down for me and we look at the underside. I assume he is determining its sex. He assumes I am doing the same.
After a minute he asks, “Is it male or female?”

“I don’t know.”

“It is a female,” reiterates the boy selling me the guinea fowl, even though he had not even joined us in the examination.

At the house in Basse I’d found a poultry manual with a section on guinea fowl. I should have read it more thoroughly, taken notes, even. I think I meant to come back later and do so, but I forgot. What I do remember is: the guinea fowl is notoriously difficult to sex. Some tips were provided, however, which my brain did not bother to retain.

The next day in class a student asks if my guinea fowl turned out to be a female. I say, “Yes, they are not fighting.” I have assumed that, like Siamese fighting fish, you will immediately know if you’ve got two males by their commencing to tear each other to pieces. Ira and Prunella have done nothing of the sort, have instead chirped happily to each other and followed each other about the yard, swallowing ants and seeds. This behavior could mean nothing at all, of course, if it turns out guinea fowl are less similar to fish than I’ve imagined. One afternoon I notice a feather on the ground that must have come from the newest guinea fowl; when Amadou plucked out Ira’s flight feather he tucked them into my roof, but the feathers from the second guinea fowl were just tossed over the fence. I decide to do Amadou Julde’s feather-drop test. Male. Try again. Male. I thought maybe I was remembering the direction of the feather wrong, maybe face-down meant female, so I repeated the test a couple of times with one of the feathers that had been tucked into the roof. (Of course, two females would be another explanation for non-tearing-each-other-to-pieces, but Alasan had come to see Ira and looked at his underside and seemed confident in the “male” prognosis). The roof feather also landed upside down. I should have everything but distrust in this method. If sexing a guinea fowl was as simple as plucking out a feather, dropping it, and noting which way it lands, surely the manual would’ve mentioned that? Surely people other than Amadou Julde would be aware of it? And what are his qualifications, anyway? This I don’t actually know. Perhaps his family raises guinea fowl.

The next day, one of the guinea fowl let out a squawking trill and I wished Julia had been around to hear. Neene comes in, she wants to see them. She said it’d been making that noise all this morning and she thought it would’ve stopped now that he’s got a wife. She points to one, “Is that the one you bought yesterday?”

I cannot remember exactly, or see exactly which one she is pointing to, but I say, “yes.” She nods in confirmation; she can tell by the way that the other one’s neck is that it’s a male.

“Man and woman,” she says, pleased. Neene should know, right? After all, she grew up in Guinea…

At school, I decide to do some encyclopedic research. The school library has several encyclopedia sets, some of them complete, none more recently published than 1967. Vol. VI (FARMING AND FISHERIES) of the Oxford Junior Encyclopædia (an inscription on the front page informs me was Presented to St. Peter’s School by the Society of St. George February 1963, although the book itself was published in 1957) provides me with the following information: “Cocks and hens cannot be easily told apart except by their voice, for it is only the hen that makes the characteristic cry, which sounds something like: ‘Come back! Come back!’” I have heard my guinea fowl making a variety of noises, one of which may be the “characteristic cry” the encyclopedia is referring to, but the noise I hear most frequently sounds something like “BRSTHGWHWW!”

Well, if it does turn out I’ve got two males, I could always eat one of them.