sport marans:

[NatJ]

I got a BCM hen that as a chick had the penguin suite, black body with white chest.
Now that I have bred her to a dark BCM rooster, I'm getting white chicks with black flecks, almost like dominant white with black co dominance.
Is this a "sport" too?
any one else?

It typically works better to start a new thread and include some pictures.

Also, when you use abbreviations, please write it out in full at least once. In this case, BCM is a common abbreviation for Black Copper Marans and Blue Copper Marans and Blue Cuckoo Marans. Depending on which ones you have, there might be very different explanations for the color of the chicks you have.

 

[Henndrik]

BCM chick with her penguin suite.

 

[Henndrik]

The same BCM hen as an adult.

 

[Henndrik]

The BCM roosters used.

 

[Henndrik]

The pure lavender long tail Araucana's and BCM's are marked with orange cable ties

the chucky cockerel below looks like he is silver with baring on his head.

a black one.

 

[Henndrik]

My question is, should recessive white give you pure white BCM chicks or white with black flecks like mine?

 

[NatJ]

My question is, should recessive white give you pure white BCM chicks or white with black flecks like mine?

Recessive white should give you pure white chicks.

White with black flecks is usually from Dominant White, which turns black to white but can be a bit leaky. If your hen produced chicks with Dominant White, then their father would have to have the Dominant White gene, which would cause white in his feathers too (which would mean the hen mated with another rooster that you didn't know about.) Or if the eggs got mixed up, and you were actually hatching ones laid by a different hen (could be a hen with Dominant White.)

I had wondered if you had two Marans with blue, because you might have chicks with splash. But when I look at the pictures, I do not think that happened.

A third explanation would be if each parent was carrying recessive genes for another color pattern, and some chicks are expressing that pattern (example: Silver Wheaten could cause something like what you first described, but the pictures do not look quite right for that explanation either.)

the chucky cockerel below looks like he is silver with baring on his head.


View attachment 4283126

I do not think that cockerel has the barring gene. I think he's got some interaction of other genes causing that appearance (similar to how Egyptian Fayoumis look sort-of barred but do not have the barring gene. They have several other genes interacting to make their pattern.)

If that cockerel came from the black hen and the black & copper rooster in your pictures, then the hen must have the silver gene. That would mean she is not a Black COPPER Marans, at which point I would wonder what else is going on genetically. If the black hen has the silver gene, she would give the silver gene to her sons and not to her daughters. (If you also have pullets that show silver, this would mean I'm wrong about the hen being the only source of silver for this batch of chicks.)

Some hatcheries have been selling Marans-mixes this past few years. Maybe your hen is one of those? That would be an obvious explanation for some unexpected colors of chicks.

 

[Henndrik]

They say the roosters sperm is viable inside a hen for up to six weeks, so I also at first just shrugged this of as it could be from an other rooster, but I hatched from her white chicks eight weeks after taking her away from dominant white roosters.
So now I'm considering that all the orange cable tied Marans chicks that hatched from dark eggs, might be pure as in being the offspring om the roosters shown above in the pics.

Maybe you are right @NatJ she might be silver, since she does not show any gold to say other wise.

but then just the male chicks, like you said, will show silver...

 

[NatJ]

They say the roosters sperm is viable inside a hen for up to six weeks, so I also at first just shrugged this of as it could be from an other rooster, but I hatched from her white chicks eight weeks after taking her away from dominant white roosters.

You are counting time from when she was separated until you started collecting the eggs for hatching, right? I agree that 8 weeks certainly should be long enough to avoid wrong-father situations.

So now I'm considering that all the orange cable tied Marans chicks that hatched from dark eggs, might be pure as in being the offspring om the roosters shown above in the pics.

I would think so, but there is obviously something weird going on here

Maybe you are right @NatJ she might be silver, since she does not show any gold to say other wise.

but then just the male chicks, like you said, will show silver...

Are you seeing silver on any female chicks? Or just on the males?

I think the white with black dots are more likely to have some gene turning black to white, rather than having lots of silver, but I can't be entirely sure. A "Silver Columbian" chicken with very little black can look pretty similar to a "Dominant White" chicken that has some black leakage.

A possible way to tell: chickens with silver-and-black patterns will usually have more black in the big flight feathers of the wings, that you can see if you spread out the wing. Chickens that are black-turned-white are likely to have the black spread more randomly, and not concentrated in the big wing feathers. (Of course neither of those is a guaranteed thing, but it does happen more often than not.)

If the large amounts of white are Silver, there is still the question of where all the black went, which brings us back to both parents probably carrying some gene that allows it (maybe Wheaten?)