Wednesday morning a couple of birds were in the street in front of the house when I woke up (when they woke me up). I had no idea what they were, apart from partridge-shaped and non-flying and vocal; Animal Control said they already had a report on them; and when I called the zoo at 9:30, the receptionist was sure they were peachicks--despite their necklessness, and non-peafowl-feet--because, after all, some zoo patrons call a gopher a chipmunk even when another patron (me) says gently, no, it's a gopher, and so everyone in the city must be that stupid. At any rate she didn't know of any escaped animals. When I got home from the millet factory, they were still browsing along the same stretch of houses, and RDC finally recognized them as guinea fowl--his grandparents kept them. Aha, I said, catching on. I had seen guinea fowl only once before, in a large Ashford backyard, where our friends kept some for tick control.
In the evening, RDC decided they and motorists would be safer if they were in our backyard, eating our bugs, shitting their nutrient- and nitrogen-rich shit in the garden, and not causing accidents. At this point, Animal Control didn't want them because they weren't a rabid dog and it doesn't deal with wildlife. Does it deal with livestock? I think they're captive, like cockatiels, rather than domesticated, like Leghorn chickens. They might be feral, like cats, but our guess is that someone was raising them until they realized how loud and unhideable they are--they're against Denver code--and then the someone released them into City Park.
Thursday I made more calls. RDC posted a query to a guinea fowl board. The Wild Bird Center suggested a poultry store, naming it as the only place in Denver that sells chicken feed and is allowed to keep chickens. I called that place, and the man said, none too enthusiastically, that he could try to find a place for them. We would bring them on Saturday. Thursday night I went to bookclub, and Friday we had a party.
RDC hosed the patio with a dilute bleach solution, and the hope was that the birds would stay in the yard and the people on the bricks. But the birds kept wanting the basement window, on the patio. RDC wondered if that was for shelter, but they had the overhang of the garage for that; I realized oh! their reflection. So I brought out the full-length mirror from the inside of my closet door and propped it horizontally against the compost bin. They loved that and had no more interest in the patio. When the guests came, we had a conversation piece, and neither the toddler nor the dog molested them. Scarf already knew about the birds and wanted them, though I teased her that they are no relation to guinea pigs (she wants a guinea pig again), and she called her mother and asked if she wanted the birds. She said yes. Throughout the party the birds behaved well by not screeching. One jumped to the garage windowsill to admire its reflection, and when I yelled at them "No sex at my party!" at least that drew everyone's attention to their clumsy balancing act, which was acrobatic and amusing, and as dusk fell they bedded themselves behind the comfrey along the south fence and slept.
Saturday morning, Maven lent her dog's flight crate to the cause, and RDC and I coaxed the birds into the narrow space alongside the garage, and then, with mirror and groundcloth, into the crate. That actually wasn't as difficult as I thought, because squawk and flap though they did, they couldn't get six feet of loft to clear the fence. Then Scarf and I drove south to her mother's fenced lot and released them.
I don't know how good a solution that will be. Though her backyard is large by metropolitan standards, she still has neighbors in the sort of neighborhood that might not want livestock. It's large, but it doesn't offer much shade or shelter, and I don't know how much it offers by way of insects or even how much the fowl need. I wasn't sentimental about their fate--I thought the poutry place was a better idea and said so--but home again with the crate scrubbed and returned, I literally washed my hands of them.
This title caught my eye in my search for Temple Grandin's book. I couldn't remember Grandin's name except that maybe her first was Summer, and the library catalog produced this with the keyword autism. Elizabeth Moon does a good job illustrating the perspective of her autistic characters, but her straw antagonists are stereotypes and she makes her protagonist act contrary to his previous motivations for a quick resolution, Flowers for Algernon having already been written. She perhaps should have camouflaged, better or at all, that she wrote it in the early 21st century but set the action several decades later: all the discoveries and technological innovations are dated to the '90s, the early aughts (though I credit her using that phrase), or the turn of the millennium.
This is the outstanding contribution to children's literature for 2005? It wasn't terrible, but either I am too old or this has been done already. It is my fault for not noticing that, horrors, this is the second book featuring these characters but I haven't read the first one yet.
Lynne Rae Perkins's book made for a pleasant couple of hours diversion in a camp chair under a tree in the backyard for a while, after cloud cover let the temperature drop from the low 90s to comfortable.