Approved colors (According to Norwegian Standard of Perfection):
Light and Dark. Sports are not uncommon (though not accepted according to the SoP), such as Cuckoo, Grey (which a group of breeders in Norway are working on) and Flame (a variety that Sand Hill has chosen to breed for). The secret to telling the difference in coloring in adult hens: Dark have grey and dark grey stripes in the down on the underside of their body and their bottom, while the Light are brown in this area. Adult roos will have mainly white feathering, though patterned, but the Dark roos will have som darker brown coloring on their back.
Legs: Yellow
Comb: Single
Ear Lobes: White
Eggs: Minimum weight 55 grams, ideal weight 60 grams, but they can lay larger too. Light Jærhøns lay white eggs, Dark Jærhøns lay more of a cream color. They are considered good layers, about 80% of the production of commercial hybrids. They start laying at approximately 5 months old.
Weight: Roos 2 kgs Hens 1.75 kgs (Bantam roos 800 grams, hens 700 grams)
This is the only chicken breed developed in Norway. It originates from the Norwegian landrace fowl as it was before foreign breeds were imported from around 1850. (Landrace refers to domesticated animals adapted to the natural and cultural environment in which they live, or originated. They often develop naturally with minimal assistance or guidance from humans using traditional breeding methods). Their development is very well documented.
Because of the interest in the imported foreign breeds the number of landrace fowl in Norway diminished, and in 1916 a breeding station was founded in Stavanger in the Jær district in Norway. They collected hathcing eggs for what would be the base for what we know today as Norwegian Jærhøns. They got eggs from different places but most from a breeder named Karl Håland who had been working on the line for years. He in his turn got his eggs from a woman named Inger Lisabet Bru who had been breeding that type of fowl for approximately 30 years, meaning that the line the breeding station worked with originated in the 1880s. They bred the birds they had collected and from that stock selected one rooster (#1) and one hen (# 26) as the breeding pair and foundation for the development of the breed. Were talking extreme linebreeding and inbreeding for approximately 100 years, with no outcrossing! To this day we have a gene bank that preserves this breed in Norway.
The original landrace fowl was much more diverse in appearance (much like Icelandic chickens) with a wide variety of colors, different combs and both with and without tassels. This is presumed to be the reason for the sports that crop up (deviations in colors) in an otherwise quite uniform breed.
They are not typical setters, as the broodiness in a large part has been bred out to get better egg production. They are active birds and are also known to be quite flighty (they can fly for as much as 20 meters horisontally if startled) and can easily roost 2 meters up. They are known to be quite hardy, and are great foragers though they will lay better with supplemented diet.
The chicks are sexable as day-olds.
Light Jærhøns: Males are uniformly yellow, females are yellow with a visible brown stripe from their head and down along the back.
Dark Jærhøns: Males are brown with a large uneven yellow spot in the head/neck area. Females are brown with a small spot.
(Grey Jærhøns: Both genders are dark brown/grey at hatch. Males have a large uneven spot, females a smaller spot.)
(Flame Jærhøns: (as they arent bred in Norway I have no idea, but can edit if anyone has info on them))
Heres a
link , if you browse almost to the bottom youll see pics of four chicks. The left ones are Dark, the right ones are Light. The top ones are male, the bottom ones female.
There is a bantam variety but that is quite young (from the 1990s) and has been developed by outcrossing to Danish Dwarf Landrace Fowl and OEGBs.
I did include a link though where there are pics (even if it is all in Norwegian
