A farm in Co. Cavan has welcomed its first set of sextuplets, after a seven-year-old Bluefaced Lecister ewe gave birth to one male and five females on Saturday (February 25).
The pure-bred ewe, which belongs to farmer Antaine O’Cúinn, gave birth to the male lamb first, which she delivered herself, however O’Cúinn had to step in and pull the following five females.
He said that the ewe has always been big, so they expected twins or maybe triplets – but certainly not sextuplets.
As all six were born prematurely; the ewe had not begun producing milk yet, meaning the full set are currently curled up under a heat lamp, being bottle fed every three and a half hours.
“It’s fairly intense when you’re not a full-time farmer,” said O’Cúinn, who is trying to manage more than six feeds a day while working full-time as a school teacher.
“Because they’re so small and premature they can’t even drink 4oz in one sitting, it needs to be little and often,” he added.
Following the delivery, he went on Facebook to look for a foster ewe, but unfortunately, when he secured one, she didn’t take to the lambs.
“They’re standing up suckling on the bottle but they’re not hardy enough to go under a ewe or push their way into a foster ewe,” he said.
Speaking to Agriland, O’Cúinn described the ram lamb as “the size of a good triplet”, but said the females are considerably smaller.
“They’re so premature, there’s still two that can’t stand up properly, they can’t feed standing up yet, they just fall over.
“They’re like hour-and-a-half-old lambs, meaning that every day that goes by they age half an hour in normal lamb terms,” he said.
The farm also welcomed a set of quadruplets last week, two of which stayed with the ewe. However, a second foster ewe was purchased for the remaining two but she only accepted one lamb.
This has left O’Cúinn with a total of seven pet lambs to hand rear, as well as a number of foster ewes to be milked.
He is now looking for devices that he could use to manage feeding the lambs during the day, as well ideas on how he can keep the foster ewes milked without investing in expensive milking machines.
Ewe
The seven-year-old ewe that gave birth to the sextuplets is “exhausted” after the lambing and hasn’t got up since, said O’Cúinn, who added that for a couple of days after the birth, he wasn’t sure if she would survive.
“She was lying down very weak and wouldn’t eat. She had stopped eating a few days before the birth but she started lifting her head today and chewing on a bit of hay,” he said.
“We’re hoping she’ll survive and if she does we won’t put her back into lamb again.
“We knew she was going to have more than one, so we had her on multi-birth and calcium and we have her on the vitamins now too.
“She propped herself up today so we’re hoping she’s turning a corner.”