Asking
@JedJackson on this one.
Barring and cuckoo work off the same color genes.
The difference is that barred birds have been bred to have even parallel barring with crisp bars of white on a black ground color.
In cuckoo, the barring is less even and more muddled, and the bars are often more gray than white on a duller black ground color.
It's a fine line. Barred rocks who aren't bred properly can have more muddled coloring than they should.
With these birds, it's difficult to say. They may be crosses of two different breeds like Barred Rock and Cuckoo Marans.
The hen has patches of all black feathers. The rooster, in addition to having a tail carried higher than is usual for rocks, also has solid white feathers in the tail.
So they're either mixed or just not well bred for color.
The male is double barred, and the female has a single barring gene. So if these were the parents, you'd expect the same from their offspring.
That means that the black chick has to have a different father than the one in the picture, because he would pass down the barring gene to both genders of offspring if he was the father.
So if the black chick is mixed, it means these chicks came from a mixed flock. In that case, you could get single barred males as well as single barred females. So gender cannot be determined by the usual way of telling barred rocks apart by the quality of the barring.
So the chicks must be judged at this stage by combs and wattles, their size plus their coloring. Raised red combs mean males. Flatter, paler combs mean females.
