These chickens are traditional copper French Marans. They come from dark brown eggs and a point of perennial fascination invoked in everyone who sees them is the colour, which is controlled by incomplete dominant alleles on a single locus. What this means is, there are two versions of a gene, one which causes black feathers, and the other which causes silver feathers. If an egg inherits two black versions, you get a black chicken. If it gets two silver versions, you get a silver/white chicken, and if it gets one of each, it hatches into a blue chicken. We always seem to end up with more of the black chickens than the other colours.
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