UNDERHILL, Vt. (AP) — Anne O’Connor just kept counting sheep, and it made her anything but sleepy.
A sheep owned by O’Connor, who runs Clover & Bee Farm in Underhill, Vermont, with her husband, Gunnar, gave birth to a rare batch of six lambs earlier this month. The sextuplets and their mother are all doing well, making the lamb windfall even more remarkable.
The same ewe previously had quadruplets, and while a recent checkup indicated she would have two lambs this time, O’Connor suspected more. When the big day came, the baby lambs seemed to have kept coming and coming, she said.
“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,” she said. “Six is great, but it’s definitely — it’s plenty.”
Sources differ on how uncommon sheep sextuplets are, with O’Connor putting the number around 1 in 1,000 and some agricultural websites placing it at one in a million or higher. O’Connor said she has been in touch with the Vermont Sheep & Goat Association about the births, and the group found only one other shepherd had a sheep give birth to so many lambs.
