Description: Roan horses change body-colors depending on the season, as the wind hairs have another colour than the short summer coat. The mane, tail, face and lower feet don't change. Roan only affects the body because only the woolly underhair, that grows thickest on the body, is white on a roan. Every year the same number of white hairs appear (while a grey horse becomes whiter and whiter with each year). In Icelandic roan horses seasonal changes are great, because one sees the underwool best in spring, when the wintercoat is shed, and in early autumn (August), when the new wintercoat starts to grow. In the winter you hardly see the white hairs, exept if you divide the over coat with a brush and look down into the underhairs. People that have bought a roan horse in one season are known not to have recognised the horse a few months later, when it had totally changed it's color. This colour is extremely rare now. So, in short, these are the season changes:
Winter: It is hard to see that the horse is roan.
Spring: Stark contrasts, with white body, and colored points.
Summer: Mealy body color, similar to roan in other breeds.
Autumn: Stark contrasts, with white body, and colored points.
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The roan mare Prinsessa from Skeljabrekku, in August,
showing the summer color. ©-LUKKA. |
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The same mare, showing the fall color. She has been
clipped under the mane, and shows the bay undercoat there.
The white middle coat is obvious. When the winter comes,
the mare is simply regular bay. ©-LUKKA. |
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Gloría from Lćkjardal in August... ©-LUKKA. |
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...and in October. ©-LUKKA. |
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A roan with a chestnut base color and flaxen mane, in the spring, loosing the last of the base coat.
Birtingur from Vestra-Geldingaholti.
©-Sigfus Sigfusson |
Here is a bay roan in April. The only sign of the roan color is a patch of white hairs peeking through in the groin.
©-LUKKA.
The same bay roan in the middle of May.
Hrannar from Gröf.
©-LUKKA
Hrannar again.
©-LUKKA
A roan with a chestnut base color (strawberry roan) in the spring.
The mare shows the head that is chestnut, and the feet, mane and tail are chestnut, while the wooly undercoat on the body is white.
Sif frá Skáney.
©-Michael Gunner Jensen
A roan with a bay dun base color in the spring.
©-Sofie Kjoelby.
Here are pictures of a mare which show very well the drastic changes a roan goes through every year.
Here the mare Freyja shows on the left picture how a black roan (blue roan) looks in the spring and fall, when the white wooly underhair is the longest hair on the body. The color of the extremeties, and mane and tail, remain unchanged.
On the right picture Freyja is in winter hairs, and then it's hard to see that she's not simply a black horse.
©-Tim Kvick
Here Freyja is again, in summer hairs. Now her body has a few whitish hairs intersperced between the darker hairs. Some roans loose even those hairs and look just their base colors (in this example, she'd look black). The foal, Rebbi, looks just ordinary chestnut there, in the early fall it was discovered that he's red roan (strawberry roan).
©-Tim Kvick
Foal color:
You can not see on a foal whether it will be roan or not. It will just show it's base color for most of the first year, untill it sheds it's hair in the spring when it's about a year old. If it's roan, you will see the white underhair then.
Some genetics:
The roan colour is on the Rn-locus. You need one dominant gene Rn in the horse to make it roan. Foals that have Rn from both parents are beleived to die. A roan foal has to have a roan parent. As the color looks very different from roan in many other breeds (there are not such drastic color changes in roan horses of other breeds), some people beleive it to be a different gene.
The color in different languages:
Norway: Ikke avblekbar skimmel
Denmark: Farveveksler
USA: Roan, redroan, strawberryroan, blueroan
UK: Roan, redroan, strawberryroan, blueroan
Dutch: Schimmel (the same word as grey in dutch, which is confusing).
Swedish: Skimmel, (the same word used for a grey horse in swedish, which is confusing, so the use of the word konstantskimmel instead has been reccommended.)
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