Black Copper Marans discussion thread

[sideWing]

I will say that he has a lot of size to him. Little too much color on the chest. The thing I dislike most he appears to be roach back.. check his back and see if he has a rise on the back where you can see the feathers ruffled up. He has a nice long back and tail set. Don

You want the tail low at this age. The tails tend to rise as they age. Too high a tail or squirrel tails are rampant in this breed, so if it is low now, that is a good thing

I'm looking at another pic I have of him and I'm wondering if I see lacing in the breast area. Is this normal or a bad thing?

 

[Sylvester017]

That's the one upside to having a DQ BCM. The Iphone camera is plenty

Yes, at my age I just want a decent shot of my pet flock and want a camera that clicks the pose fast and not wait a second for it to adjust to the light, etc, and after the chicken has already moved out of the focused pose! I have many shots of a chicken's blurry butt walking out of the picture or a bird suddenly scratching it's itchy nose or turning its head away! Straight digital point-and-click camera qualities aren't really that bad - the pixels have improved greatly - it's just the annoying split-second wait for the automated focus adjustmemts that make me lose a good chicken pose. I must be asking for too much

 

[desertmarcy]

I'm looking at another pic I have of him and I'm wondering if I see lacing in the breast area. Is this normal or a bad thing?

That's not lacing, that's just excess coloration in the breast, and no, you don't want that. Ideally IMO, you want a solid black breast although the standard allows for "a few copper spots" but that is way more than a few and he will probably develop more breast coloration as he matures.

 

[scflock]

That's not lacing, that's just excess coloration in the breast, and no, you don't want that. Ideally IMO, you want a solid black breast although the standard allows for "a few copper spots" but that is way more than a few and he will probably develop more breast coloration as he matures.

Couldn't a black hen help that?

 

[Ihilani Coffee]

I would love to know.... Since a common fault is the feathered toe is significantly shorter than the inside toe with no feathers.

So maybe I described that wrong at first?

There is the middle toe, the longest toe, and then the toes on both sides of that middle toe, one is supposed to have feathers, the other not.... But both of those smaller toes should be the same length, and often are not... With the feathered one shorter.

I have not experienced this as "common" at all.

 

[Ihilani Coffee]

I don't care if it is counted as a fault or not..... (Or, I guess I don't care much

)

I care that it is possible to get a feathered foot without the "rudimentary toe"

And, with no scientific basis whatsoever, I just think that other toe deformities are more likely in birds that have the rudimentary toe (thank you very much for giving me the proper terminology).

I don't actually know though, only a guess.... If anyone on here has some other idea as to what deformed toes could be linked to... Or maybe it truly is linked to nothing clearly visible....

However, whatever the case, I want to make sure that next breeding season I end up breeding zero deformed toes... So
I did a hard cull and removed all birds with rudimentary toes, thinking that the one deformity might/could be linked to the other.

Quote:
The shorter outer toe trait has been given the mutation name: Brachydactyly - By gene (autosomal incomplete dominant). There is a strong correlation with foot feathering - ptilopody (feathered shank) & the brachydactyly trait. So some researchers believe the Brachydactyly trait is not a separate gene, but one of the ptilopody genes.
So technically it's brachydactyly. We see it in maybe 1% or less of our Marans chicks.

 

[Alaskan]

I am glad to hear that it isn't that common.... The last set of shipped eggs that I hatched, most of them had brachydactyly.

Also, my breeders have been hatching out some chicks with brachydactyly, and they are not related to the ones I just shipped in and hatched.

I simply assumed that the toe malformations that I had this year might be due to the brachydactyly, which is why I want to get it out of my breeding stock.

 

[kjanes]

7 weeks!!

 

[sideWing]

That's not lacing, that's just excess coloration in the breast, and no, you don't want that. Ideally IMO, you want a solid black breast although the standard allows for "a few copper spots" but that is way more than a few and he will probably develop more breast coloration as he matures.

Thank you for the reply. I will put him with some darker pullets and see if it balances out. I have read about folks having a lot of luck with that.

 

[doubleleft]

I'm looking at another pic I have of him and I'm wondering if I see lacing in the breast area. Is this normal or a bad thing?

His problem is the dreaded "Shafting" (streak/fine line right down the center of feather /// in this case the breast feathers)