The multiple birth, which is a record for this British farm, occurred during a vicious storm that battered much of Europe
Storm Eleanor may have come and gone, but Jan. 3 will certainly be a memorable occasion for one British farmer.
During the early hours of last Wednesday, as a deadly storm raged across Western Europe, Alastair Kerr from Ballymena, Northern Ireland, was out of bed watching over one of his ewes give birth to a whopping five lambs.
Thankfully for him, the young farmer had already brought his heavily pregnant ewes into a dry house for lambing, where he is able to watch them from his own house using a camera system.
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Kerr runs a flock of pedigree Hampshire Down sheep mixed with other breeds and has 110 ewes set to lamb this winter.
This particular ewe is a Zwartbles Beltex crossbred, which was impregnated by a Texel ram.
“It is her first set of lambs,” said a chuffed Alastair.
“She was showing signs of lambing late on Tuesday night when Storm Eleanor started to appear, and I knew that she would lamb at some stage in the night.
“I had no idea she was carrying five lambs, which is a record for my flock here,” he said.
“I am lambing 110 sheep this season, and I have them all in the shed where I can keep an eye on them from my own house with the camera.
“At around 5 a.m., this sheep started to lamb, and I came out to make sure she was OK. The winds were howling here at that time of the morning.”
Kerr’s young ewe lambed easily herself without any assistance from him and gave birth to four male lambs and one female.
“They are all very healthy and feeding well,” he said.
“Normally it’s not ideal to have so many lambs from one animal as they can be small and won’t last. But in this case all five are doing well and we are topping them up with colostrum at regular intervals. Let’s see how they get on.”
Kerr is no stranger to ewes producing high numbers of lambs: last year his flock produced four sets of quadruplets.
“It is a tough ask for the mothers, especially if they are first time mothers,” he said.
“The remarkable thing is that this particular ewe was scanned to have triplets, but instead gave birth to five lambs. Storm Eleanor must have helped ease another two out of her.”
Although it’s not the first time a ewe has given birth to five lambs, it is quite rare for five healthy lambs to be born.
In fact, the odds of a sheep having quintuplets is said to be one in a million.
The multiple births were also a unique event for Kerr’s six-year-old son, Sam, and three-year-old daughter, Nicole, who just can’t stay away from the new family.
