Saturday, April 18, 2009

12 Step Program Needed!

My name is TheMartianChick and I am a hatchaholic! After having two successful quail hatches, I am feeling confident enough to move on to chicken eggs. Not just any chicken eggs, but Black Copper Marans! To most people, a chicken is a chicken, is a chicken...unless it's fried! To people who are really into breeding chickens, the BC Marans are something special. The eggs are a deep, deep brownish red color. The darker the egg color, the more desirable the bird.



The eggs now reside in the incubator along with some Rhode Island Red hatching eggs. Tomorrow, they will be joined by some blue-green Ameracauna eggs that arrived in the mail today. The eggs need to recover from their postal journey before going in the incubator.




Once hatched, we plan to keep all Marans hens at our house and one or two roosters at a friend's farm for breeding purposes. We will likely keep an Ameracauna hen or two for the novelty of having green eggs. All of the Rhode Island Reds will be sold as chicks on Craigslist along with any other Ameracaunas. Of course, the more chicks that we sell, the faster the incubator will be paid off.

2 comments:

ChristyACB said...

Wow, those are gorgeous eggs!

Why are they more desirable the darker they are? Do they taste better?

Carolyn Evans-Dean said...

The eggs taste like any other eggs... The breed is judged by the darkness of the eggs. Kind of like the breed standards for dogs in a dog show. Some dog breeds are supposed to have ears that stand up straight and others are supposed to have certain uniformity in the color of the coat. With the Marans, the birds fit the breed standard when they have dark colored eggs. In fact, a Marans that lays eggs that are deemed to be too light on the Marans scale isn't supposed to even be allowed to be called a Marans!