A farmer has revealed her shock at the birth of 'one in a million' quintuplet lambs.
The Bulled family have been farming sheep and dairy at their West Buckland farm, Buckingham’s Leary, for many generations, but Adrianne has only been involved with the animals since marrying 12 twelve years ago.
They are helped by daughters Jorja, Tayla and Daisy.
Adrianne said: "I’m a townie turned farmer. We married 12 years ago, but I only got involved since our youngest started school. I’ve only been doing lambing for four years, still quite new to it all, and having quintuplets has come as a complete shock.”
The quintuplets were born on Saturday, March 25, with four boys and one girl.
The family hopes to keep the girl on the farm to keep the original generation going. She will be joining the 70 other sheep on the farm.
Adrianne added: “We started with four sheep around nine years ago. The mother came from one of those, and she usually has triplets or quads every year.
'This year she started lambing, and it was a tangle in there with lots of legs, and we kept going until we got to five. I’ve been told it’s meant to be something like one in a million, although I haven’t looked into it properly. A friend Googled it and found that; whether that’s true or not, I don’t know.
“I put it on a Facebook group, Ladies that Lamb, and one of the jokes on there was because there’s four black ones and one white one, is that the inkjet ran out of ink. The group were shocked as well. I think there have only been two photos of quintuplets shared there.
"It did come as a shock, though. I thought to myself at the time, ‘oh dear’ because at the time we had all the sheep in, we hadn’t put any out due to the bad weather, and I didn’t know where I was going to put her and where we were going to find the room for five lambs and a sheep.
"It’s a bit like being a mother again for me; back to midnight feeds as their mother has only got two boobs, so she can only take two. That means we’ve got three of them that we have to come in and top up with a bottle at 7pm, midnight, 4am, and noon. It’s pretty tiring.
“I’ve told friends in the farming community, and they have been wowed and asked what we would do with them. We find a lot of people who want to come and see them,” she told DevonLive.
Her husband Simon has been a farmer all his life, with their farm going back many generations.
He said: “I’ve never seen this before, and I don’t think my father, who had the farm before us, had seen this sort of thing either.
"My dad, Christopher, is the boss and father of the farm, and he got me and my brother involved, and my dad was the second generation. Now I’ve got my three girls helping out, and they have been getting up, helping, and doing the night checks as well.”
Tayla said: “It’s pretty tiring having to get up in the night and do it, but it’s all fun.”
Jorja added: “I have to take pictures all the time and send them to friends at school as they all want to see the lambs. They all want to come up and see them all the time.”
Adrianne explained it was good for their children to grow up on a farm. “It’s a good experience, and it’s lovely for the kids,” she said. “They get to grow up with all of this, not Nintendo and Xbox.”
