Svart Hona (Svarthöna) Chickens

A landrace breed originating in Sweden, the Svart Hona or Svarthona shares the fibromelanistic trait of its famous cousin, the Ayam Cemani – they are almost completely black, inside and out. Also called the Swedish Black Hen, this breed is larger, more cold-hardy, and FAR more rare than Ayam Cemani. Their eggs are small compared to our other breeds, but they lay well and have excellent fertility. Many people believe that the extra melanin in their meat has more health benefits than regular chicken does. We haven’t tried it ourselves yet, but people swear by it!

Our line is from a private breeder who has had them for almost 10 years and includes genetics from both Greenfire and Ewe Crazy Farms, the only known farms who have imported the breed from Sweden. Ewe Crazy actually used a GFF rooster for quite a while, so GFF is pretty much unavoidable.

We have only had them for about a year, and we will work hard to reduce the faults we’ve seen. There hasn’t been anything major like pink mouths or white feathers, but some of the roos we’ve hatched have had mulberry in their combs or wattles, some have a little bit too light ears, and some have floppy combs. 

While these are defects to watch out for and correct, they are not as much of a dealbreaker as with Ayam Cemani because these guys are SO rare and the organization monitoring them just wants to get numbers up before culling for these lesser flaws in coloring. That’s why the Swedish SOP does allow dark purple combs/wattles and flopped combs as long as vision isn’t obscured. The preferred ear color is blue-gray.

We will of course only use the best birds we hatch, so we hope to reduce these minor complaints as time goes on. They’re all still AWESOME birds and act like spunky little crows.

UPDATE July 2023: About 10% of chicks have been hatching with pink toe tips. That is VERY common with Svart Hona chicks. We have also hatched a total of two chicks this year with white wing tips. They usually grow out to be fully black, but it is considered a default. We are pausing our Svart Hona offering to test our entire flock and find out who the culprit is. We hope to be back up and running with our Svarts in the spring of 2024!