I have exciting news! We will be getting some FREE maran chicks (3 weeks old by the time we can get them). Most of them are roosters, but we will have no problem finding homes for some of them, and we will plan on trying to caponize some for eating and keep one rooster and whatever hens are in the lot for eggs for our own use. We have to drive quite a ways for them, but we would have had to do that in spring when we were planning to get some adult ones anyway…and then pay quite a bit for them at that. I am so excited, I am jumping out of my skin!

What I love about these…they have a docile temperment, are easy to handle, look nice, and lay the darkest eggs. I understand that in their first year, that the eggs come out almost black. So cool.

If you are not familiar with them, check out these links that I found:

http://www.backyardchickens.com/breeds/marans/4158

http://blackcoppermarans.org/a/13 (this link has an egg color scale)

Well, we have the chicks. He threw in 8 extra black ones. I guess that was good, because we lost 8 on the way home…they all huddled together and they must have suffocated. :(

They cost us $2 a piece if we consider the cost of fuel.

Unless we are mistaken, we think that he was great at sexing them. He wasn't sure how good a job he did. We figure they are mainly cuckoo marans roosters.   We were hoping for some hens as he said mainly roosters…it was a gamble on our part. We will check them out in other ways instead of just using the spot on top to tell, but they all seem light in color, nobody looks darker…except for the extra 8 he threw in. They are fully black though. We have some mystery chicks, I guess. These guys have the feathers starting on their legs. We are unsure if they are roosters too, or a cross, or another variety or breed all together. Unfortunately, we only have 4 of those left. I am hoping that they could be French copper marans. That is what I am really after.

On sort of a bright side, the place where we picked these up (we had someone pick them all up & hold them for us for a couple of days) gave us a young cuckoo marans hen. She is blind in one eye, so we will have to watch the dominant hen of our already established bunch, but I read of some creative ways to curb bullying. We'll see how it goes.

As far as caponizing…we now have some dead ones to try things out on. We have never done it, but have only read about it and looked at some illustrations. I am not sure if we will follow through on that now though or just butcher them before they mature fully. Of course, we will be keeping a couple to mature.

If we find out anything different, I'll post.

For those of you familiar with marans…is it possible for a cuckoo to be fully black (no barring or spot on the head) or could this be a different variety, or even possibly pullets? As I said, the legs are feathered…

Hmm…on another note, I used a syringe to "blow" our first ever egg from our own chickens! I will put a ribbon on a toothpick and put it in the hole to use as an ornament. It will be a most special ornament on our tree this year and hopefully for years to come. 

Yippee!!! We are the proud owners of 2 French Black Copper Marans roosters in amongst the Cuckoo ones. We were hoping that we would have that breed. It was the one that we really were after. We were clearly able to see the copper  around their necks and some blue tint on their feathers yesterday!

Unfortunately, the guy was good at sexing the roosters…we are sure that there are no pullets, but that is the chance we took. We will replace our aggressive Bergs Brown in spring with some more docile FCM hens.

I am dancing inside over our coppers!  Woohoo! WooHOO!!

Yeah, in some ways, me too.