Marans Thread for Posting Pics of Your Eggs, Chicks and Chickens

[drom]

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It's a spam actually, but it has provided a little free entertainment. And, I had never read about Cassowaries before.

It appears they they have 3-toed feet with dagger-like claws, are very dangerous and the female is dominant and kicks butt.

Even better, the female has a little harem and the male raises the chicks! W00t!

Wow, was I born in to the wrong species or what?

Oh, and I tracked down our stealthy poster, Terra Firma, all the way to Queensland. He is most definitely a very sincere and devoted avian enthusiast.
And, he is always welcome here

if he would like to post any pictures of Marans Eggs, Chicks or Chickens... or all three. Because that's what we all love to do here.

And, our patient Moderators like us to try to stay on topic. Hopefully, they will continue to understand, as they have been, that the rest of us here can't control what some others do.

 

[Terra Firma]

Hi Drom, drifting off the topic for a moment.

When you're holding a conversation online, whether it's an email exchange or a response to a discussion group posting it's easy to misinterpret your correspondent's meaning. And it's frighteningly easy to forget that your correspondent is a person with feelings more or less like your own.

It's ironic, really. Computer networks bring people together who'd otherwise never meet. But the impersonality of the medium changes that meeting to something less -- well, less personal. Humans exchanging ideas often behave the way some people behind the wheel of a car do: They curse at other drivers, make obscene gestures, and generally behave like savages. Most of them would never act that way at work or at home. But the interposition of the machine seems to make it acceptable.

Of course, it's possible that you would feel great about saying something extremely rude to the person's face. In that case, Netiquette can't help you. Go get a copy of Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour. When you communicate through cyberspace, via email or on discussion groups -- your words are written. And chances are they're stored somewhere where you have no control over them. In other words, there's a good chance they can come back to haunt you.

Terra

 

[AHappychick]

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Well welcome

I thought your post was a hoot, just threw people off cause it was your first one

So what made you look at this thread in particular? have you been reading all the back and forth on these Marans and just chuckling? It can get pretty funny sometimes. The again we are all chicken/bird folk and I am willing to bet each one of us is more than a little nutty

Drom says you are an devoted avian enthusiast please tell us about your birds

The Cassowary pic was cool I had never heard of them before but how interesting the are!

 

[drom]

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I am sincerely sorry if I offended you in any way. And I couldn't agree with you more on what can happen to people's manners once they get behind a laptop.

Actually, the thread was shut down briefly the other day because of people posting off topic. That is why I made the comment. The Moderators here are good people just trying to keep order and keep everything civil. When a person with a new identity on the thread comes in with only one post by their name and posts off topic and anonymously, it's easy to mistake them for ne'er do well trolls because that is usually the case unfortunately. I apologize if that was not your intention.

Welcome

and please don't take any offense

 

[ruth]

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Even better, the female has a little harem and the male raises the chicks! W00t!

Wow, was I born in to the wrong species or what?

Oh, and I tracked down our stealthy poster, Terra Firma, all the way to Queensland. While perhaps not the sharpest tack in the information technology box, ....... And, our patient Moderators like us to try to stay on topic. Hopefully, they will continue to understand, as they have been, that the rest of us here can't control what some others do.

Who here is the sharpest tack? "Not I said the fly. Not me said the flea" And who here always stays on topic?

Terra Firma - I loved your post. Welcome to BYC. Your sense of humor will be most welcome on any other thread. But, unfortunately there are some here, on this Marans thread, that either have no sense of humor or no life outside of Marans or are just a little too overwound - because they feel a need to attack and criticize anything that is not 100% accurately/factually/historically/grammatically accurate.

I thought your post was the funniest thing I had seen in along time - laugh out loud funny - wish I had thought of it myself - but then someone would have felt the need to track down my identity as well just in case I was a "troll".

Merry Christmas everyone. And have a happy Spirit this holiday season. Life's too short to take it so seriously. Especially where chickens are concerned. You know they are only chickens. And yes, oh my gosh, I said "only chickens". Marans are still just pooping chickens - nothing more, nothing less. Well, it's Christmas and my family, friends, kids and grandkids are waiting to gather and share gifts and love and the true meaning of Christmas.

 

[drom]

I just had to post this one again. This is from the Fresno show early this year and I am still amazed at the eggs that Bee sent in. They were literally the color of coffee beans. She is such a nice person and has a bird she calls the wonder hen who lays these eggs. I am glad I actually stopped by the show and saw them; I wouldn't have believed it otherwise.

I'm going to delete a couple pics so I have room to post some pictures of her eggs that I never did post before.

 

[drom]

Here are the pics I didn't post. They were also some of the largest eggs I've seen.

These pictures were taken with a flash, so they actually look quite a bit lighter here than they were.

 

[americana-chick]

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Wow your rooster looks just like one of my former roosters.. had no idea what he was.. and if he was a maran i regret selling him now

 

[Resolution]

It's nice to see that not all Marans aficionados are what we once termed Morans.
This stock is healthy, bright eyed, in perfect feather- and nothing but eulogistic terms could be used to describe your oef!

I would like to put something out there that many of you may or may not have known and that is that before we, that is Cabbage Hill Farm Foundation imported them, there were very few, if any. Black Copper, no Golden Cuckoo and no Wheaten Marans in the U.S.A.. I probably shouldn't assert that with that much conviction as its been so many years since then and I've been working with so many other breeds- please write in if you know different- but it is my distinct recollection, that I fell in love with the black copper and and golden cuckkoo - the wheaten and engaged myself 100% to bring them in and by every means necessary- I recall less clearly- that at the inception of the North American Marans club, there were quite a few cuckoo and nothing much else. The problem we had at Cabbage Hill was that a really extraordinarily annoying and self-serving opportunist, who was for quite some time the general manager of Cabbage Hill Farm. Having no real interest in chickens or respect for money- she thought it was for burning on exmores and highland cattle fancy cars and the like-she refused to maintain the bloodlines.- We carefully maintained chicks from the very few eggs that hatched that we brought in until they were adult birds. We kept them in separate enclosures with microchips and legbands- exhaustive photo documentation and even DNA work- a college internship project for Marlboro students-
We maintained the respective stock in separate enclosures so as to keep the stock from each Each European farm - and each strain separate. She, the feather duster brained farm manager- just arbitrarily went out and mixed all the chicks that had just hatched a few days before on different trays- she mixed them together one-day. She did this because school children were visiting the farm and she wanted a photo opt. Needless to say I lost my nonsense. I rushed down from Vermont to witness the mess myself. This was the first year that we hatched our first fifty or so chicks from all the imported stock. We had a major program in the marans with so much invested. I was never able to separate them from there.I gave up and the people involved with Marans at the time, with very few exceptions, were truly moronic. Of course I had the opportunist fired but the damage to the Marans initiative was permanent. We never recalibrated a serious interest in them again. All the birds running about Cabbage Hill at this very moment are a composite of the best possible lines in all of France,Brittany, Belgium and Switzerland. We sent tens of dozens of not very dark eggs out to people all over the country and we instructed them they could regain egg colour based upon what we had learned from the French and Swiss. There were diet issues and more specifically a very detailed form of backcrossing -select breeding that improves the egg colour with each generation. I'm happy to see how many great birds are out there. How many of them originated from stock that I personally picked out, we'll never know, but to point out one line - the Leurquin- is a disservice both to our foundation and to Dr. Leurquin. We have been involved in several projects now with high school students where they have taken our composite stock and select bred it in the manner dictated in Poitou and have been very excited to see that ~ sixty five maybe even seventy% of the stock responded -by producing consecutively darker oef with each generation. We did find that -as Bev Davis pointed out to me and I did not believe- that when one crosses two colour varieties one loses colour and for a longer period- you are adding two to four generations of selective breeding when you cross colour types. So if it is a Black Copper breed to Black Copper- even if it is lousy one- just don't cross it to cuckoo or visa vis.


Really dark egg producing birds bred to other really dark egg producing birds- of unrelated strains and colours can end up producing really light coloured eggs. I don't know if this is the rule, but we brought in two lines of birds that both laid the darkest, coffee coloured eggs I've ever seen. Bred together, they produced blegh. I can't even tell where the genes went. Each line was so well bred, combining them undid all that work. I should mention that one line was Black Copper and the other was Wheaten.
The Leurquin line was one of six or seven lines that we brought in and each or most of these included at least two colour varieties- my favorites being the black copper, golden cuckoo, and the wheaten. - I think a goodly percentage of the Cabbage Hill birds ended up as Brown Red. Not certain how that happened. I think they were from the Poitou stock as these eggs were chosen from a basket not from the flock itself. It may be that Brown Red is a mutation of one of the other colour types or is the product of recombination. As I hope I made clear earlier, I am not by any means an expert, or even knowledgeable with the colour varieties or strains of the Marans. My interest is strictly in the inheritance of the dark brown egg.

 

[drom]

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Thank you so much for taking the time to share these stories and information that we are all so interested in; it's fascinating for us to hear about your early work with the breed. The oeuf pictured directly above are from B. Davis BCM lines I believe. I think she has said this hen is somewhat of a rarity; needless to say, I am sure Bee is working with her as hard as she can to produce some 2nd or 3rd generation stock with the same outstanding egg color.

If you are ever interested in posting some, we would love to see pictures of your early birds. If not, that's OK, we are just as happy with your stories on the history of the breed here.