Geese and guinea fowl are low-effort alarm birds: the parent article puts a goose alarm call at 500 m or more and describes guinea fowl as screaming at any unfamiliar person, animal or snake. Keep them in the outer zone or by the gate, learn the difference between alarm and chatter, shut them in a predator-proof house at night and keep small children away from adult geese.
Part of Early Warning Systems
Alarm poultry are geese and guinea fowl kept for their loud, immediate response to unfamiliar movement, covering ground between a dwelling’s fixed alarms and its dogs.
Birds Raise The Alarm Without Training
Roman tradition holds that geese on the Capitol gave the alarm when Gauls tried to climb it, a story the parent article dates to 390 BC; the details are legend, but the behaviour is real. The parent article puts the carry of a goose alarm call at 500 m or more. Geese are loud, aggressive to strangers, very sensitive to unusual movement and hard to approach unseen. Guinea fowl give a distinctive, high-pitched alarm that differs from their ordinary chatter, call at any unfamiliar person, animal or snake, and need little care. They also eat ticks and insects, according to the parent article.
The disadvantages come with the virtues. Geese honk at foxes, deer, falling leaves and wind, and guinea fowl are extremely noisy in general, which can reveal your presence to anyone listening. You learn which sound is an alarm by listening for weeks.
What You Need
- A flock, reared from young so it knows the household.
- A night house, shut at dusk and opened at dawn, built to resist predators. See Poultry Housing and Predator Proofing.
- Water and grazing, since geese graze and need drinking water. General keeping is in Poultry Keeping.
- A pen or run near the gate or the outer zone.
- A safe distance between the flock and the family’s sleeping places.
Method: Place, House, Listen
Step 1: Put the flock where the outer zone’s traffic passes. Near the gate, beside the lane, or at the edge of the garden, so the birds see movement you cannot.
Step 2: House them at night. The parent article says geese need not be penned at night if the area is secure from predators. I would pen them anyway: a goose is an easy meal for a fox, and a flock killed by a raid is a lost alarm and lost food. A shut house is a decision you make once.
Step 3: Learn the calls. Keep a log for a month: time, call type, cause when known. Ordinary chatter is varied and low. An alarm call is loud, sharp, repeated and directed at a point.
Step 4: Add a rule for children. Geese are aggressive to strangers, and children are strangers to geese when they are small and run.
Step 5: Check the flock daily. A silent flock in daylight is itself a signal. See Animal Behavior Signals.
Common Mistakes
- Leaving them out all night. Predators take them, and the alarm is silent when you need it.
- Housing them under the bedroom window. Geese and guinea fowl are loud on false alarms, and a household that cannot sleep stops responding.
- Treating the sound as a direction finder. A flock that is spread out sounds from several places; watch where they look.
Safety
Geese bite, flap and chase
An adult goose can bite hard and strike with its wings and can knock over or frighten a small child, and even a calm gander is aggressive in the breeding season. Fence the flock away from play areas, warn visitors and teach children to keep out of the pen. Wash any bite or scratch from poultry promptly: poultry carry bacteria such as salmonella on their feet and in droppings.
What’s Next
- Learn next: Interpreting Animal Alerts — telling alarm from ordinary noise
- Combine with: Dogs — the mobile sentinel that works beside the birds