I have been keeping Lavender Marans for several years and have always been a bit disappointed in their egg color compared to the Coppers. No doubt this is from whatever cross was made to get the lavender gene into the Marans (I’m guessing a Lavender Orpington).
In 2024, I crossed a lavender pullet to a copper cockerel and hatched a bunch of chicks. Most were cockerels (isn’t that always what seems to happen), but I got 3 pullets and put them with the best looking of their brothers to create F2’s. I was pleasantly surprised at how dark the eggs were from these F1’s. I had long suspected that the males are more important to egg color than the female size of the cross, and this certainly seems to confirm that. The problem with crosses like this is that the F1’s are generally fairly uniform across characteristics (in this case, egg color being my main concern), but F2’s tend to segregate the genes into many combinations, with the (likely recessive) lighter egg color genes very likely to show up. My plan is to keep the lavender F2 chicks and see what they lay.
