This article was originally written by Ed Chatterton for SWNS — the U.K.’s largest independent news agency, providing globally relevant original, verified, and engaging content to the world’s leading media outlets.
On the Croft family farm in Lincolnshire, England, an ewe defied the odds by giving birth to a set of five healthy lambs earlier this month — a ”one-in-a-million” occurrence, some say.
Sisters Liz Genever, Kate Genever, and Susan Genever-Jones are the third generation of their family to run the farm, which was started by their grandfather Albert in the early 1950s and today has around 300 sheep.
Sisters Susan Genever-Jones (left) and Liz Genever (right) with the quintuplet lambs.
The sisters were clued in after a routine scan checking if their ewe was healthy revealed five babies. “We knew we had to feed her more as she was carrying more than most,” Susan, 52, who also works for the National Association of Agricultural Contractors, told SWNS. “And she was absolutely enormous during pregnancy.”
Susan explained that two of the newcomers arrived around 2 a.m. on April 9, and by 4 a.m., the ewe had delivered the other three, all on her own. “It was a really lovely surprise. I did have a quick look at the odds, and it says one-in-a-million but I don’t think it even happens that often,” she said. “We might get four to one sheep once a year, so you might get that from one sheep out of around 500. But to have five and for them all to live and be healthy is very rare indeed.”
One ewe can only nurse two lambs at a time, and they aren’t really equipped to look after more than three, per sheep researcher Cathy Bauman, who spoke to the CBC after a similar quintuplet sheep birth in British Columbia in 2023.
“I always joke, she [the mother] can only count to three, so once they’ve had three lambs, they ignore the ones that are born afterwards or forget about them,” Bauman said. “But it just means that we have to intervene a bit more, so it’s much more labor intensive.”
On the Croft Farm, two of the lambs are staying with their mother, and two others are being bottle-fed and hand-reared. “Another one has been taken on by an adoptive mother who lost her own lamb this year. So they are all still on the farm, albeit in different places,” Susan said.
Incredibly, and beating even lower odds, the quintuplet birth wasn’t the first for the farm: The family welcomed another set there decades ago, in 1978. (And if that weren’t wild enough, a different quintuplet lamb birth occurred on a separate family farm in England just last week as well!).
“Kate and I were very young back in 1978 so we don’t remember it. But to have lightning strike twice at the same farm almost 50 years apart I suppose makes it even rarer,” she added. “Liz was born two years after that but I’m sure we’ll all remember this for a long time.”
Follow along with the lambs’ progress on the farm’s Instagram account.
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