By Allan Featherstone. Special permission to use this article has been obtained from the brilliant Pekin Bantam Club of Australia which featured in their February 2004 newsletter. A fantastic Pekin Club and a very generous and knowledgeable bunch of people. Fantastic

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The breeding of cuckoos is relatively easy if you go about it the right way. Although I no longer breed them myself, I still enjoy the sight of a nice pen of well marked birds. Most people I have spoken to about breeding cuckoos used an exhibition coloured male over a black hen., This in principal should give you a percentage of 1 in 4 cuckoo pullets, l in 4 cuckoo cockerels and the remainder being black. However that is not the results that I obtained over several breeding seasons I often found that I had to breed about 20 or so chickens before I hatched a cuckoo pullet, the cockerels being much more common. Most of the pullets I bred from these matings were black. The way I found to be give the best results was to copy the recipe that is in the Pekin Handbook for breeding barred pekins. That is, to mate an exhibition coloured male to a cuckoo hen, from this mating that 50% of the cockerels were light coloured cuckoos, not what they require for the show bench although I used to show them quite successfully because I think they look just as good as the darker coloured males.

I have proven on several occasions that these light coloured males when mated to a black hen will give you nothing but exhibition coloured cuckoos, none of the offspring will be black. This gives you some options come show time and you end up with more than 1 or 2 cuckoo pullets to choose from as you would have done had you mated cuckoo to cuckoo.

Mating the light coloured Cuckoo male to a black female also gives you the opportunity to begin improving the cuckoo type by using outstanding Black females
Of cause that is not all that is required, you still have to select birds to breed with that have the correct markings right down to the skin. If you were to use birds that have a lot of white under colour or fluff, you could not expect the chickens to have the cuckoo markings right down the full length of the feather to the skin.
My results have shown that breeding cuckoo to cuckoo is also a good way to fix the depth of barring. This can be done by simple selection of the best marked birds to breed from.

You will notice the distinct clarity and distinction between the French grey and the darker colour in the light cuckoo male above. This will aid to produce more distinctly coloured offspring It is not necessary that the black female you mate to him is bred from a cuckoo to cuckoo mating,she can be an ordinary black

It is important to breed from cuckoos that have exhibited clarity of colour right from an early age. For the best reference for colour clarity please refer to the the extract of feather photo below (from The Mating and Breeding of Poultry H M Lamon 1920 UK)

Mating an exhibition coloured male to a black coloured female should produce nothing but exhibition coloured birds

Clarity Diagram: