Ana Martinez |
Brión (A Coruña) (EFE).- “Marujiña” is the name of a Galician sheep that last Saturday gave birth to four live young, an unusual multiple birth among its species that has caused enormous expectation in the Guisande area, a Brión country setting, in A Coruña.
The white quartet has filled the home formed by Adelina, Andrés and their three children, Alejandro, Lucía and little Daniel, with joy.
“It’s very good. In a sheep’s udder there are only two mammary glands but she organizes herself to feed all this offspring”, Adelina told EFE, while on the land surrounding the house, and which is protected by a fence, the sheep family walks peacefully despite the rain.
“Marujiña” has been with them for two years. She arrived pregnant and that delivery had left three lambs. Then there was another delivery, similar, with three others. And now, this one of two females and two males, still without assigned names.
The gestation lasted five months, which is the average, and the delivery went “very well”.
Inside the house, the adolescent Lucía recounts enthusiastically, “everyone was paying attention” on the eve of Father’s Day to the well-known film “Back to the Future”, directed by Robert Zemeckis, when at one point Adelina interrupted the viewing to go visit “Marujiña”.
His was a full-fledged feeling. What he never imagined is the surprise she was going to find, that picture.
They were told, the oldest of the place, that surely one of those born “was not going to be achieved” and that it would be a matter of hours. But that fatality has not occurred.
“Marujiña” attends instantly when hearing that affectionate name. When a sheep is given a name, it comes “ready” to each call.
With a mild temperament, it is shy at first, only if it sees someone it is not used to. Her children go after her, without losing sight of her.
The chalet bell rings. It is Antía, an almost 5-year-old girl who has found out about the event and wants to see it with her own eyes. Her look says it all, verifying that what they have told her is what she is witnessing.
“But what beautiful little things!” she exclaims.
Evening falls. “Marujiña” feeds early and repeats at the end of the day. Grass is in large quantities.
Along with “Marujiña” and her offspring there are chickens (some of which want to steal the show), rabbits, fish and a dog as big as it is kind. They all understand each other.
A little over a decade ago, on December 27, 2012, in Valga (Pontevedra), “Mora”, a 5-year-old sheep, the same as “Marujiña”, was the mother of four pups at the same time. Until then, like Brión’s, she had had three more than once but never exceeded that number.
His case had been very curious because the young of this sheep, which was black, came out white.
In March 2022, at Agropecuaria Banejo, located in the Valladolid town of Pollos, there was another surprising birth of four lambs in which they all survived, something that does not happen “far from it every year”, they had shared at that time since the exploitation mentioned. The mother sheep raised two and another nurse the rest.
In 2019, on the road to La Albuera, in the Tierra de Badajoz region, a Teodoro Carrera sheep made headlines for giving birth to four lambs. Despite the care taken, one of them died.
Closing the list is “Soledad”, a sheep from Gozón, a council in the northernmost part of Asturias, which had quadruplets in 2016 and all of them males. Until then she had been the mother of one or, at most, two children and all of them were always female.
