Baby boom down on small breeds farm

The Small Breeds Farm and Owl Centre has seen about 15 new owls born and four sets of twin goats - and more are expected.

Owner Jay Brittain, 63, said: "We have 32 different species of owl, over 100 individuals and we're expecting about 30 to 40 young ones by the end of July.

"We breed some of the rarest owls in the world. Most breeders like to keep quiet about it, but here you can get nose to beak with them.

"The public pay for what we have here, so we feel it's only fair to share them."

Meanwhile, the farm, which has the world's smallest breeds of cattle, sheep and goats, has had tiny sets of twins born to pygmy, golden Gernsey, Angora and boer goats.

"It's fairly common for goats to have twins but to all arrive in the space of 10 days is rare," Mr Brittain said.

"It's the year of twins for goats and some of them are still expecting. We're growing daily, so we're having a bit of a population explosion."

New additions on the farm include alpaca Carlo (son of dad Monty) who has been bottle-reared after his mother rejected him and woodford owl Casper, who is also hand-reared.

Mr Brittain has been running the centre near Kington on the south Shropshire border for 24 years, along with his partner Gill Struthers and four members of staff.

He returned to the region with the desire to get away from the hustle and bustle of life down south, he said.

"I wanted to escape the rat race - I'd been a teacher down around Rochester, Chartham and Canterbury and also playing music out of London - but my father (Rev John Brittain) was vicar of Highley, near Bridgnorth, so it was kind of coming back home," he said.

"I started with a couple of goats and a few ducks. I just opened and waited for people to come, and they haven't stopped coming - but it's grown enormously since then.

"We're open every single day of the year including Christmas Day.

"What also makes us different is that the whole place is exclusively about birds and animals, we don't have children's play areas or other attractions - some people might want that, but other places can do it better.

"But when it comes to birds and animals, nobody does it better than us," he said.

The centre recently made the headlines when Mr Brittain began painting the tiny talon of the new born owlets with ladies nail varnish, with the first hatched getting orange talons, the second purple and the third pink, and so on.

He came up with the unique idea for a serious reason - the fluffy owlets can look identical to one another, but overfeeding them can be fatal, so staff needed to tell them apart to keep track of who had eaten what.

As far his plans for the coming months, Mr Brittain said not all the new animals could stay.

"A lot of the owls will go to other centres, private collectors, even breeders in Japan," he said.

"And much against popular belief I will not be opening a nail bar in Kington later in the year," he added.