If you're used to chicken breeds where everyone is supposed to look a certain way, Hedemoras might confuse the hell out of you.
One can be black while another is blue-gray or nearly white. Some have smooth feathers, while others look like they wandered through a dryer with a wool sweater. Their legs can be smooth or feathered. Most have four toes, but five can happen too.
And none of that automatically means somebody screwed up the breeding.
Hedemoras are a Swedish landrace, and the variation isn't something we're supposed to breed out of them. It's part of what makes them Hedemoras.
What Is a Hedemora Chicken?
The Hedemora is a medium-sized landrace chicken from the Hedemora area of Sweden. And the word landrace matters here.
Unlike a standardized chicken breed where breeders select toward a very specific appearance, landraces developed over generations in a particular place under the conditions that existed there. Survival, reproduction, production, flock behavior, and the ability to function in that environment mattered more than everybody looking exactly alike.
That's why Hedemoras have considerably more variation than people accustomed to standardized breeds might expect. There isn't one single Hedemora "look." There is a framework of characteristics, and within that framework, variation is something worth preserving.
The Swedish breeding guidance specifically emphasizes maintaining variation, appropriate size, reasonable production, good parental characteristics, and functional flock behavior rather than allowing color or one unusual physical trait to become the entire breeding goal.
A Swedish Chicken With a Long History
Hedemoras have been kept on farms around the Hedemora area for as long as local tradition records, and they have a long history of being given as bridal gifts.
Which, frankly, beats getting another gravy boat.
The population preserved today traces back to chickens identified by Viola Forsberg of Sandviken. In 1982, Forsberg recognized chickens like those she remembered from childhood and obtained hens from a neighboring farm near her parents' home in the village of Trollbo. Those chickens became the foundation of the Hedemora landrace gene-bank population.
That's an important part of their story. These aren't chickens somebody recently created because fluffy birds were cute and marketable. They're the continuation of a Swedish farm chicken population that people deliberately worked to preserve.
What Do Hedemora Chickens Look Like?
This is where Hedemoras get fun, because the answer is basically: Which one?
Hedemoras have wide, strong bodies and tend to look rounder and heavier than they actually are. Hens generally weigh around 1.5 to 2 kg, or roughly 3.3 to 4.4 pounds, while roosters generally weigh around 2 to 2.5 kg, or roughly 4.4 to 5.5 pounds.
Their legs may be completely smooth or lightly feathered. Four toes are most common, but five can occur, and bone and beak color can vary. Their earlobes are usually red with varying amounts of white.
Hens generally have fairly small single combs. Roosters have stronger single combs, but they aren't especially tall. Some Hedemoras can also show fibromelanistic traits, meaning dark pigmentation isn't necessarily limited to what you can see on the comb, wattles, and face. Fibromelanosis can affect pigmentation throughout the bird's body, including the skin and internal tissues. The amount of visible pigmentation can vary considerably from one Hedemora to another.
The Swedish breeding framework specifically notes that black or blue pigmentation may be visible in the comb, wattles, and face, making darker pigmentation another example of the natural variation found within the landrace.
In other words, if you're standing in front of a group of Hedemoras waiting for them all to match, you're going to be standing there awhile.
Hedemora Colors: Don't Expect Everybody to Match
Hedemora plumage can be blue or gray, black, white or nearly white, with wild and wheaten coloring occurring less frequently. Individual birds may also show different colors through the neck and saddle feathers.
That variation is important. A Hedemora breeding flock isn't supposed to become a lineup of identical chickens because somebody decided one particular color was prettier or easier to sell.
In landrace conservation, color is secondary to maintaining the whole chicken.
We'll come back to that, because it's one of the most important things to understand about breeding Hedemoras.
Let's Talk About That Hedemora Fluff
One of the most distinctive Hedemora characteristics is their plumage. These birds have very dense, downy feathering, which the Swedish breeding framework points to as evidence of their long adaptation to a cold climate.
There are also different feather structures within the landrace. Some Hedemoras have normal smooth feathering, while others have what's described as woolly feathering.
On woolly birds, the feathers lack the tiny hooks that normally hold the parts of a feather together, creating a loose, soft appearance similar to Silkie feather structure.
Then we've got the saddle. Hedemora hens can have strongly developed saddle feathering with cupped feathers that create a sort of pillow at the back end.
And then we get to my favorite official Hedemora characteristic: the pants.
They can have so much feathering around their thighs that it partially covers their legs and gives them the appearance of wearing wide pants. That isn't me making fun of them. That's essentially how the characteristic is described in the breeding framework.
Hedemoras have pants.
I don't make the rules.
Are Hedemora Chickens Good for Cold Climates?
Cold adaptation is one of the things Hedemoras are best known for, but there's a difference between saying a chicken is adapted to a cold climate and pretending it's magically winter-proof.
Their characteristic dense, downy plumage reflects a long adaptation to cold conditions. That makes them especially interesting to chicken keepers dealing with genuinely cold winters.
But we're not going to tell you they're frostbite-proof, because the breed information doesn't support that. We're also not going to promise they'll crank out eggs all winter simply because they're Swedish.
Cold adaptation doesn't mean normal winter management stops mattering. They still need appropriate shelter, ventilation, dry conditions, water, good nutrition, and protection from the elements.
What you're getting is a chicken population shaped over generations in a cold environment. That's considerably more interesting than slapping FROSTBITE RESISTANT on a picture of a fluffy chicken anyway.
How Many Eggs Do Hedemora Hens Lay?
For a landrace, Hedemoras are respectable layers. The Swedish breeding information puts production at around 150 eggs per year for a hen that has not been broody.
That last part matters. If your hen decides she's going to spend part of the year sitting on eggs and threatening your hand with bodily harm, she's obviously not laying eggs during that time.
Hedemora eggs generally weigh around 50 to 55 grams. Egg color ranges from off-white to slightly brownish or beige, and darker dots or small spots may occur.
So no, you're not getting rainbow eggs. You're getting a practical farm chicken that happens to dress like a Scandinavian feather pillow.
Fair trade.
Do Hedemora Hens Go Broody?
Yep. The breeding information estimates that around 30 to 40 percent of Hedemora hens may go broody when given the opportunity.
And broodiness isn't automatically something we want to eliminate from a preservation flock. Good parental ability is one of the functional characteristics emphasized in landrace breeding.
These chickens weren't developed merely to look interesting in a backyard. They were farm chickens, so the ability to reproduce, raise chicks, function within a flock, and keep being useful chickens mattered. Those functional traits still matter when we're deciding what deserves to be preserved today.
Hardy Doesn't Mean Invincible
There's an interesting piece of Hedemora history that gets lost when people reduce them to "SUPER COLD-HARDY SWEDISH CHICKEN!"
Like landraces generally, Hedemoras have been valued for hardiness in the environment where they developed and resistance to common poultry diseases. But the Swedish breeding framework also notes that Hedemoras had begun showing greater susceptibility to disease than they had previously.
Deliberate breeding work improved the population's general health again, and the guidance stresses that maintaining those qualities is extremely important going forward.
That's worth paying attention to because preservation doesn't mean putting a rare chicken in a glass box and congratulating ourselves for keeping it alive. It means continuing to preserve the traits that allowed the population to function in the first place: health, hardiness, reproduction, appropriate size, reasonable production, good parenting, and functional flock behavior.
In other words, preserve the whole chicken.
Why Breeding Hedemoras for the Weirdest Traits Can Backfire
Woolly feathers, five toes, and feathered legs are all cool traits to find in a Hedemora. But that doesn't mean more is always better.
The Hedemora breeding guidance specifically warns against consistently selecting both roosters and hens for woolly feather structure, five toes, or strong leg feathering. Repeatedly concentrating those traits can strengthen them to the point that breeders begin changing the character and function of the landrace.
This is where preservation breeding and novelty breeding part ways.
If every generation you choose the fluffiest bird with the most heavily feathered legs, five toes, and whatever color happens to sell best, eventually you're not simply preserving the variation that naturally exists within Hedemoras. You're deliberately pushing the population in a new direction.
And that's exactly what we're trying not to do.
What Should Hedemora Breeders Actually Select For?
The Swedish breeding guidance gives us a pretty damn good answer: maintain wide variation within the breed framework while paying attention to appropriate body weight, reasonably good production, good parental characteristics, functional flock behavior, health, and hardiness.
And importantly, color shouldn't become more important than all those other characteristics.
That's preservation breeding.
It doesn't mean breeders never make selections. Of course we do. It means we're thinking about what those selections do to the population over generations rather than simply asking which individual bird has the coolest trait.
Pretty is allowed.
Pretty just doesn't get to run the breeding program.
Why Variation Matters in a Landrace
This is one of the biggest mindset shifts when you start working with landrace chickens.
Variation isn't necessarily evidence that somebody bred them wrong. It's part of the population.
One Hedemora may have smooth legs while another has a little leg feathering. One may have four toes while another has five. One may have smooth feathers while another is woolly. One may be black while another is blue-gray or nearly white. All of those variations occur within the Hedemora breeding framework.
That doesn't mean every possible trait combination is automatically desirable or that breeders shouldn't select at all. It means selection should preserve the functional landrace instead of forcing it toward one fashionable appearance.
That's a very different goal from breeding toward a rigid show standard, and frankly, it's one of the reasons we love working with landraces.
You never quite know what you're going to get.
Are Hedemora Chickens Right for Your Flock?
Hedemoras are worth considering if you're drawn to chickens with real preservation history, natural variation, respectable egg production, broodiness, and generations of adaptation to a cold environment.
They're especially interesting for someone who understands that a preservation flock isn't supposed to look like a box of matching chickens.
On the other hand, if your primary goal is maximum egg production or you want every bird to conform to one exact appearance, Hedemoras probably aren't the chickens you're looking for.
That's simply not what they are.
And trying to turn them into that would miss the entire point.
Preserving Hedemoras at Cluck It All Farms
For us, keeping Hedemoras isn't about producing the fluffiest bird or chasing one particular color. It's about preserving Hedemoras.
That means respecting the variation that's supposed to exist within the landrace while keeping an eye on the things that actually matter: health, appropriate size, production, parental ability, flock behavior, hardiness, and genetic diversity.
Some chicks will grow up looking completely different from their siblings.
Good.
That's part of the fun, and part of the responsibility.
Because when you're working with a landrace, you're not trying to manufacture identical chickens. You're trying to preserve a living population.
Want to Raise Hedemoras?
If these weird, fluffy, wide-pants-wearing Swedish chickens sound like your kind of people, we raise Hedemoras here at Cluck It All Farms.
You can check out our Hedemora hatching eggs and Hedemora chicks to see what's currently available.
Just don't ask us what color your chick is guaranteed to grow up to be.
Have you learned nothing from this article? 😂
Final Thoughts
Hedemoras aren't interesting because they're perfectly uniform. They're interesting because of the history, adaptation, variation, and functionality packed into those fluffy little bodies.
They're cold-adapted without being magical. They're productive without being egg machines. They retain useful brooding instincts, and they come with enough natural variation to remind preservation breeders that our job isn't always to make chickens more uniform, more unusual, or more marketable.
Sometimes the job is much harder than that.
It's making damn sure we don't lose what was already there.
🐔
Snow piles around them
No two Hedemoras match
Wide pants rule them all
