Lambing time on the family farm is nothing new to four-year-old Ernie Tranter and his brother Walter, aged three but, judging by their expressions, the birth of quintuplets certainly had the wow factor.

It was quite a welcome surprise too for the boys’ parents Nicole and Caerwyn Tranter, who took on the tenancy at Croes Las Farm, near Raglan just two years ago.

The ewe and all five lambs are apparently doing well…

Nicole and Caerwyn are young entrants into farming, both under the age of 40, and are gradually building up the sheep numbers on their 113-acre holding.

“We currently have 95 mule x ewes that we put to a Charollais tup and a Suffolk tup. The quintuplets are clearly a mixture of both rams’ offspring,” said Nicole.

“We only had a few sets of triplets last year, but this year we’ve had record numbers of triplets, a set of quads and now these!”

Nicole thinks it’s down to the mild weather in autumn and winter, when the grass kept on growing and the ewes kept benefiting from it.

It’s taken a while for Nicole to get used to the vagaries of British weather - but one thing she never complains about is the amount of rainfall.

Nicole was born and raised in Australia where her parents have a cattle and sheep farm near a village called Dimboola on the edge of the desert between Melbourne and Adelaide.

Surprisingly though, her first experience of lambing was on a farm in England.

“My parents raise sheep for their wool and the ewes usually have just one lamb which is born out in the paddock,” she explained.

Nicole studied for an agricultural sciences degree at the University of Melbourne but, with jobs in farming hard to come by in an area which hadn’t seen rain for a couple of years, she decided in 2000 to come over to the UK to work on farms and do some travelling.

She met future husband Caerwyn on a farm near Usk where he was undertaking a summer baling contract.

“It wasn’t exactly love at first sight!” she said. “It was the hottest day in Wales for a decade and the baler had broken down so he was throwing his tools around and in a really grumpy mood.”

Caerwyn was born into a well-known farming family but was raised on a cattle farm so he is also a comparative newcomer to sheep rearing.

“The ewe that produced the quintuplets had been particularly large and feeling uncomfortable. The scanner suggested she was having triplets and we just assumed one of them was very big,” said Nicole.

“She needed some help delivering the second and third. After they’d arrived safely we didn’t think to check for any more but she suddenly started pushing again and two little feet appeared and out came four and five! It was a lovely surprise - and amazing that they all survived.

“We’d never seen quintuplets before and when I called in at the vets recently they said they hadn’t seen any in ages either.”

Because ewes only have two teats they can only feed twins - so two of the quintuplets stayed with mum while three have been bottle-fed.

With just nine ewes this season having single lambs and the rest having twins or more the Tranters have been looking after 21 pet lambs.

Nicole explained, “We give them the ewe’s first milk for 12 hours because it contains colostrum, then bottle-feed them by hand for a week to make sure they have a fighting spirit.

“After that we use a ‘shepherdess’, which involves mixing powdered ewe’s milk and transferring it to a bucket with a heating element which has teats at the side so they can help themselves.”

The ‘shepherdess’ is a godsend on any farm during lambing time but particularly for the Tranters as Nicole, in addition to her farming duties and keeping an eye on two mischievous little boys also teaches full-time in the Animal Care Department at Coleg Gwent, Usk campus.