When Anne and Gunnar O’Connor’s vet predicted twins for one of their ewes this spring, they prepared for a quiet morning in the barn. Instead, lambs just kept arriving, and a rare Vermont farm sextuplet birth turned into the talk of the local sheep community.
- A ewe named Teemu delivered six healthy lambs at Clover & Bee Farm in Underhill, Vermont on April 9, 2026.
- The mother is named after Finnish hockey legend Teemu Selänne, and her lambs got Finnish number names to match.
- Estimates of sextuplet sheep births range from 1 in 600 to 1 in a million, depending on the source.
A Counting Mistake Nobody Minded
Anne O’Connor just kept counting sheep, and it made her anything but sleepy. She and her husband Gunnar run Clover & Bee Farm in Underhill, Vermont, where their ewe gave birth to a rare batch of six lambs earlier this month. The catch? A recent checkup had suggested she would have two lambs this time, though O’Connor suspected more.
Her hunch came from experience. The ewe had quadruplets in the past, so when three and four lambs arrived, it wasn’t a shock. Then things got busy fast. Anne was drying off the ones already on the ground when she noticed Teemu lay down again, thinking there was no way there could be five. Six showed up shortly after.
“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. Suspicion confirmed, times three.
Meet Teemu and Her Tiny Hockey Team
The naming theme is where this story really scores. Teemu the sheep is named after Hockey Hall of Famer Teemu Selänne, and just like her Finnish superstar namesake, she delivered. The farm leans into Finnish heritage for good reason. Teemu is a finnsheep at Clover and Bee Farm in Underhill, and her babies arrived earlier this month.
To keep the theme going, the O’Connors gave the lambs names straight out of a Helsinki kindergarten counting book. The six lambs are named after the Finnish numbers one through six: Yksi, Kaksi, Kolme, Neljä, Viisi and Kuusi. Anne especially likes the cadence of a few. She thinks number four, Neljä, is a really cute name, and that Kuusi was very appropriate for six’s personality.
The lineup includes four ewes and two rams. The O’Connors plan to keep the four ewes and find homes for the two male lambs.
Just How Rare Is This?
Sextuplet sheep births don’t happen often, though the exact odds depend on who you ask. Sources vary 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. Veterinary experts land somewhere in between. Dinesh Dadarwal, an associate professor at the University of Saskatchewan, estimates the chances of sextuplets at somewhere between 1 in 600 to almost 1 in a million.
What caught Dadarwal’s attention is that Teemu pulled this off naturally. In his own past case, his team had been using a protocol that increased ovulation, but the fact that Teemu had so many lambs without any stimulation stood out. He suspects genetics. He thinks it might be a mutation of one or a couple of genes that can lead to multiple ovulations.
Vermont’s tight-knit shepherd community took note as well. 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.
Caring for Six at Once
More lambs means more work, especially in the early days. The second lamb was very weak at first, but all six are doing well now. Anne basically moved into the barn for a while. She slept there the first few nights to do bottle feedings with little Kaksi every two to three hours for the first week or so.
Other shepherds with sextuplet experience offered reassurance. Kristen Judkins of Gilead Fiber Farm, who owned a ewe that had sextuplets three years in a row, noted that the lambs do take longer to reach full body weight, but most do just fine. The first few weeks are the watchful ones.
The whole thing has become a family project. Even the O’Connors’ 5-year-old son Cedar is soaking up every bottle and cuddle of the small surprises. The farm welcomes visitors who want to see the lambs in person.
A Hockey Hall of Famer Would Be Proud
Teemu Selänne scored 684 NHL goals across his career. His ovine namesake might have him beat in raw productivity, at least for one spring morning in Vermont. As O’Connor put it, six is great, but it’s definitely plenty. Between the Finnish-named lambs, the surprise count, and a tired but happy farmer who slept in the hay, this is the kind of story that reminds you spring on a small farm rarely goes according to plan, and that’s usually a good thing.
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