The Couple

Have I mentioned "The Couple"? These are the 2 who stay very much to themselves and spend most of their day two properties over from us. For months we had to go and find them every evening and remind them how to get over the same fence they had quite happily flown over in the morning. Lately they've been turning up later than the others in the evenings, but at least they've been coming home and saving us the trouble of going to find them.

The night before last they did not come home. Ro-roh.

The next morning I was working outside during the morning, so kept an eye out for them to see if they might wander back. Eventually I see the guy bird, Guthlac. He's running up and down the front lawn carrying on an absolute treat. He just keeps squawking and squawking and calling and calling. So I think, Oh dear! Pega didn't come home – something's happened to her.

A little while later, I'm working at the front of the house and I hear him still frantically calling, but now he's next door. So I think, Oh very well, I'll go and check him out. So I go over there and look up and down the fence, and there he is sitting on a fencepost calling and calling and calling and calling – he's just distraught – and so I think, She's either lying there dead or she's lost or something. So I cross over the paddock and climb over the fence and go up to where he is and he's till there sitting on the fencepost going on and on and on. When I start to get close to him he finally stops calling and flys off and runs back across the paddock towards the house. OK, I give up. So I'm about to turn around and head back and what should I hear but a guinea hen laying an egg – and the noise is coming from one house further over. So there's a guinea laying an egg over on the other property and I think, Well, that's our grey hen, Pega. And about 10 seconds later, over comes Guthlac. I see him coming across the paddock there and he's running as fast as his little legs can carry him and he runs across the paddock and jumps over the fence and straight off through the woods he goes – just absolutely a straight line to where the noise had come from. So off I goes after him through the woods and when I get onto the lawn at the back of the house, who should come walking along as if everything was perfectly fine, but Guthlac and Pega, The Couple. Reunited. And I tell you, if guineas could whistle nonchalantly, I would swear that's what they were doing. Who? Us?