Farmers in Vermont expected a sheep to have twins, but she ended up giving birth to a rare batch of sextuplets earlier this month. Anne O'Connor, who runs Clover & Bee Farm in Underhill with her husband Gunnar, just kept counting sheep as the lambs kept coming.
Unexpected Windfall
The ewe, named Teemu after Finnish hockey legend Teemu Selänne, had previously given birth to quadruplets. A recent checkup indicated she would have two lambs this time, but O'Connor suspected more due to the ewe's size. When the big day arrived, the lambs seemed to keep coming. "I was a little bit suspicious, just given how big she was and that she was going a little earlier, that she might have more than two," O'Connor said. "Six is great, but it's definitely — it's plenty."
Rarity of Sextuplets
Sources differ on how uncommon sheep sextuplets are. O'Connor estimates the odds at around 1 in 1,000, while some agricultural websites place it at one in a million or higher. The Vermont Sheep & Goat Association reported only one other shepherd had a sheep give birth to so many lambs.
Kristen Judkins of Gilead Fiber Farm, who owned a ewe that had sextuplets three years in a row, noted that these lambs take longer to reach full body weight but generally do well with monitoring. "You have to keep an eye on them for the first few weeks to make sure they are getting enough to eat," she said.
Lambs and Future Plans
The lambs, partially Finnsheep breed, are named numbers one through six in Finnish. The O'Connors plan to keep the four ewes and find homes for the two males. The farm raises sheep for wool and also grows herbs and berries. With the six new lambs and two other recent babies, the flock has grown to 21, and five ewes are currently pregnant.
Teemu's breeding days are likely not over. O'Connor said, "She's a great mom, she's doing awesome with this. She's still very much in her reproductive years, so probably a year or more and she'll just, you know, be able to put her hooves up."
