Nobody was yawning as a mother sheep delivered surprise sextuplets.
The Associated Press reports that the sheep, which is named Teemu and belongs to Vermont resident Anne O’Connor and her husband, was expected to give birth to two lambs. Instead, she delivered six.
“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 says. “Six is great, but it’s definitely — it’s plenty.”
O’Connor estimates the chances of sheep sextuplets are about one in 1,000, but the AP cites agricultural websites putting the number at one in 1 million.
Either way, six lambs is a lot of baby sheep, and it sounds like Teemu might be having even more in the future.
“She’s a great mom, she’s doing awesome with this,” O’Connor says. “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.”