Guineafowl as psychic wounds

 Crows and their kin have big brains. If you make a graph comparing the weight of various animals’ brains with their total weight, you’ll get a line that Darwin would recognize as the story of evolution. Some of the more primitive animals don’t really have brains. Mammals have larger brains. Corvids are a flier on the graph.

A guineafowl, by contrast, is a big bird with a small head — “a walnut on top of a watermelon” is the way country folks usually put it.

My grandfather kept guineafowl, and I had to help him in the seemingly hopeless task of trying to keep them alive.

The birds would walk out to the road in front of the house and be astonished by the view. No tall grass to hide food or predators. They’d stand in the road and look one way and then the other and would still be looking when they’d be flattened by a truck.

It was a dismal job for a boy, collecting the carcasses. Sometimes a big truck would take out half a dozen birds.

My grandfather was hardheaded. He kept thinking the birds would pay off, despite the losses.

Guinea hens have a two-note call, described as “pot-rack” in the South and “buck-wheat” in the North. The hens begin squawking and then slowly synchronize the two notes until they are in unison. It’s loud and unnerving.

It’s also a behavior that keeps them alive. Grandfather’s birds roosted in a chinaberry tree. No two hens would face in the same direction. If anything moved — a stray dog or a leaf blowing in the breeze — the birds would raise the alarm. They were more alert than any watchdog.

During the years my grandfather kept guineafowl, no one ever slept through the night.

Perhaps in compensation for being so helpless, these birds evolved strange superpowers. I’ve never seen anything so efficient at killing snakes. Coyotes are good. But the guineafowl exterminated snakes wherever they ranged.

The hens would be so excited when one blundered across a snake in the pasture. The word would spread, and instantly the whole flock would descend on the poor reptile.

The guineafowl were also incredible eaters of grasshoppers. I came see that the guineafowl had evolved like the prairie chicken. They were creatures of the grasslands, and the pastures of East Texas suited them.

The big grassland birds evolved to eat the insects. The plagues of locusts that destroyed crops on the Great Plains occurred after hunters killed off the prairie chicken, shipping hundreds of thousands of carcasses a year to the East Coast and on to Europe.

Texas had plenty of grasshoppers, and so my grandfather was right. The guineafowl found their niche and survived.