One afternoon arriving home, we saw a whole family of helmeted guineafowl (Numida meleagris) walking in the garden and across the road. Obviously, we stopped to take a closer look. I captured a video (which I share below) of the event, and we did not make much of it. But as I walked outside, I heard them again. They were still there! I ran up to the house to get my camera, and I took some closeup photographs of the little chicks. But in the background, I continually heard the shouting of one chick, separated from the rest of the bunch...
It was locked behind a gate (how the little chick got there I am not sure)...
Little did we know that it would take us about an hour to try and get the little chick to its parents. The parents waited, shouted, in search for their little baby now lost, one of the many but still they waited. It was heart wrenching to us, as we soon realised that the chick will die in the garden if we could not get it past the gate.
The mother and father waited in the garden, trying to hide from us, and trying to protect their babies. But as soon as all of this was going on, the loud shouts from both mother and father and the chick that got stuck, the falcon and hawks already circled around us. It was really in a matter of 20 minutes or so for the predatory birds to fly low in search of the chicks calling to their parents... We needed to rescue the little baby!
By sheer luck, we somehow managed to get the little chick to escape the garden! How did it even get into the garden, we thought, because it was in a strange place... Only that little chick can tell us!
But this just shows us again how cruel nature is, because if we did not hear the mother and father shouting, and the shrieking shouts from the little baby, it would have died...
But how much can we humans intervene? It is after all our fault that these chicks get stuck behind our gates protecting our property, but the same could have happened in nature, and there only the strongest and smartest must survive. Did we help the gene pool or did we jeopardise it?
I am sure that this one chick will not mess with the fate of a species, but it makes one wonder, thinking about all of this...
As soon as we helped the little baby get back to its brothers and sisters, I caught them again trying to get to a place where they should not go! They needed to jump up a ledge many times the height of their bodies. It was cute but so sad at the same time to look at them trying to just survive this urban jungle of our human creation.
At last they all made it! In the end, I could not watch them any longer, because around every corner there lurked danger. My heart could not take it. I wanted to help them, I wanted to bring them to my garden where I am sure it was safer than the other gardens. But I also knew I needed to let nature do her own thing.
So, I stepped away, looking at them for a last time, said a small prayer to the helmeted guineafowl gods to protect these new hatchlings, and then I walked away...
Such is life, they say.
Happy birding, and keep well.
All of the musings and writings are my own, albeit inspired by the trials and tribulations of these little birdies. The photographs are my own, taken with my Nikon D300 and Tamron 300mm zoom lens.
