The Brainless Bunch

 Among the most popular of animals in many zoos are, ironically, one of the least endangered and (for the keepers) most aggravating.  Free-roaming peafowl (especially the males, with their beautiful colors and long trains) are the delight of many zoo visitors, and the ultimate headache for many zookeepers.  Peafowl, however, aren't the only birds that can sometimes be encountered free-roaming at your local zoo.  You might see chickens, for example, or perhaps waterfowl, either wild or, more commonly, domestic.

You might also spy something out of the corner of your eye that resembles a bowling ball with a tiny little head, hurtling across the path.  More likely than not, you'll hear it before you see it, with its creaky, cackling call ringing loud.

If there's one bird that's caused me more headaches over my career than the free-roaming peafowl, it's been the free-roaming guineas.  The birds are the domesticated strain of Numida meleagris, the helmeted guineafowl.  Native to sub-Saharan Africa, the species has been introduced across the globe as a farm animal, from Australia to the West Indies to Europe.  Growing up, I'd occasionally see one darting across the main road near my house, as if hoping to see if they could cause a car to swerve and crash.

Domestic guineas look reasonably like their wild-counterparts, though, as with all domestics, they are more prone to color morphs, such as pied or pearled.  Primarily raised for meat, it has the added advantage of being an excellent consumer of pests, especially known as devourers of ticks, including those that spread Lyme disease.  They also are used as sentries to warn chickens to predators.

Unfortunately, I never was able to witness that keen sense of self-preservation for which guineas are supposedly kept.  In my experience, they've been some of the most bumbling, hapless animals ever, always getting in trouble and needing to be saved from predators, both wild and managed (just because you can go anywhere in the zoo doesn't mean that you should... such as, say, a big cat enclosure).  They would get chased by visitors and not figure out how to get away, or wander into open buildings and not figured out how to get out, or stand stupidly in the middle of foul weather and completely ignore the shelter that they used just the night before.  They seem absolutely, almost deliberately, brainless.

Of course, the only "danger" that they ever showed much real cunning in avoiding was... well, me.  Whenever I needed to catch them up for something, suddenly evolution and instinct kicked back in and they became masters of evasive maneuvering again.  Once I even resorted to trying the old Wile E. Coyote routine and leaving food underneath a box propped up with a stick and tied to some string.  It didn't work in real life any better than it did in the cartoons.

Well, what did that say about me if I couldn't outsmart the dumbest animals in the zoo?