Un-ewe-usual lamb quintuplets surprise Marion farmer

MARION - On one of his busiest days of lambing season, Bret Blackford of Marion was in for a big surprise.

Blackford returned to his lambing room from his father's farm Saturday afternoon to find one of his plumpest ewes beginning to give birth. Out popped one lamb, then another.

Within 20 minutes, the ewe had given birth to five lambs - quintuplets - all alive.

Quintuplets are so rare that Blackford and his father had never seen any in more than 40 years of raising sheep.

Blackford suspected something big was going to happen because of the size of the ewe.

“She looked like a 55-gallon oil barrel,” Blackford said. “I had to help her get up a lot of the mornings so she could get up and eat.”

One of the lambs had difficulty breathing and died about 30 minutes after being born, despite Blackford's efforts to revive her. He bottle-fed the other lambs and has already found a buyer for two of them.

While lamb quintuplets are rare, exactly how rare depends on the breed. Some estimates place the odds at 1 percent or 2 percent of all births in the overall sheep population. Michigan State University sheep expert Alan Culham, in a 2009 Lansing State Journal interview about sheep quintuplets at a Michigan farm, placed the odds at one in 10,000 for a specific kind of Suffolk cross ewe.

The mother was a Dorset-Suffolk cross, and Blackford said Dorset ewes are known for their prolific lambing.

Six of Blackford's ewes gave birth within a 24-hour period over the weekend, making for a sleepless night.

“I was busy,” said Blackford, who's had a lot of bottle-feeding to do.

Blackford likes to show sheep in competition. His sheep business is known as Blackford Club Lambs.