A Donegal farmer has his hands full this past fortnight as two sheep on his farm gave birth to six lambs each within a week.
Single lambs and twins are the norm in breeding ewes, while triplets are common. However quads are occasional and quintuplets, and sextuplets, are extremely rare.
Peter McGee, from Ballintra, said the lambs, and the two ewes, "are doing very well".
"I delivered every one of these lambs myself. They were bottle fed every two hours for four days, then every three hours and we worked onto four hours," he said.
"It's just a miracle. It’s unreal. It took a bit of watching. We were up day and night. They prolapsed as well".
The lambs came from two five-year-old cheviot-bred ewes and a texel ram. A scan during pregnancy showed the first ewe was carrying six lambs and the second one was carrying five lambs.
Peter's wife Eilish said the hard work over the past few weeks has paid off on the farm.
"It makes all the hard work worth it when you see them jumping around and playing.
"We have six grandchildren, and they were here earlier, feeding them. They love doing all this work as well. It’s lovely".
A 2018 scientific paper entitled the 'Distribution of sheep litter size: a worldwide survey' examined sheep breeding across the globe.
The paper, co-authored by Dr Orla Keane from Teagasc, analysed the litter size distribution of adult ewes per breed over a 22-year period from 1995 to 2017.
The litter size data from Ireland that contributed to the Bodin et al paper 2018 found that there were three litters of six lambs or more out of almost 34,000 litters.
Of those three litters, two were in breeds that are known to be very prolific as they carry a major gene affecting ovulation rate, Lleyn and Belclare.
Mr McGee said he has never heard of an ewe having six lambs in the area.
"I never heard tell of it [before]. One man said to me that I’ve nothing only trouble but it’s great - it lifts your spirit. There’s so much bad news. It’s good to see a little bit of good news on the horizon," he concluded.
Gerard McDaid, a lecturer in Agricultural Science at ATU, said it is "very unusual" for a ewe to have six lambs a year.
"We have about 2.8 million breeding ewes in Ireland across 35,000 farms," he said.
"The likelihood of getting five or six lambs per ewe would be quite unusual, but to have two on the one farm in the one year is very unusual."
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