We have been raising Blue and Black Copper Marans for fourteen years and the challenge has been tremendous. They are a fairly new breed in this country and have questionable ancestry in many cases and it has been difficult to get them to breed true and without faults and disqualifiers. Lots of hatching and test mating have gone into our Marans breeding to get them to conform to the SOP. We have more work to do in getting the size and conformation we want on our birds, but we are getting closer. The degree of difficulty is high with Marans because one must always be mindful of egg color. We have had to remove many dark laying hens from our Marans breeding program that had not met the standard, and some great for standard birds have not met our egg color criteria.