Mourning their Mate

Shorty barked just after 6.20am, she must have heard a commotion with the guinea fowl, but she quickly settled and didn’t ask to go out.  Just after 6.30am the guinea fowl were in front of the house and I noticed that one of them was limping, when I counted them, one was missing.  After feeding the dog and horses I was taking hay to the goats and noticed the birds were still a bit noisy and heading back to the oat paddock.   At the far side near the forest, I saw some magpies swooping down to the ground.  With my super long range eye, (thanks to a LASIK eye surgery mishap leaving me with multi-faceted/multi-focal eyeballs like a fly), I could see a small patch of white over 100m/300ft away on the ground.  I dropped the hay and jogged across the paddock and found the dead guinea with its neck torn out and its brain   and eye picked out. She was still warm.  I carried her back to the other birds and laid her on the ground. They all circled with their buzzing call and investigated her.  They stayed with her for about 5 minutes then walked off together and carried on with their day.  We hadn’t considered magpies a threat.  Eagles? yes, Foxes? yes, Magpies??   We had hatched her in the incubator and she was flying free for just over a year.  Brad buried her beside Long John Silver in the pet Cemetary.