Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have a 35lb female. I got her a month ago and she has never dug anywhere in her pen. Today she started digging near her house and has been at it for 2 hours. what do you think is she going to lay?

Maybe, I dont know if a 35Lb sulcata is big enough, but i dont know.

Is it digging with its front legs/

Another possiblity is she just wants to dig a burrow. If you can provide enough "hide boxes" for one who only wants to dig then they often will stop that.
Ours has never been a digger because one of the first things I read when we first adopted her was that if you provide enough hiding spots they won't dig so we bought used & dirt cheap wooden dog houses for her. That seems to have worked, she's never dug a burrow but she did dig some nests & laid eggs this year.
When she dug the nests she began with her front feet, then as she got down to a point where she was close to where she wanted to be, she began to use her back feet as shovels.
Very carefully digging the ground with her back feet.
It could be nests your tortoise is trying to dig or it could be that she doesn't have enough hiding spots.
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PHRatz

Ok this is her first time laying according to the person I got her from. She laid 8 eggs one appeared to be a collapsed egg, one is oblong and 6 are round like golf balls. She laid the eggs and packed them well into the ground, you would never have been able to tell by the way the soil was compacted that eggs were ever laid. She did a good job for the first time and she only dug one hole. I have them setup in a incubator at 86 degrees. We will see what happens since this is her first time.

Mine wasn't supposed to see a male, wasn't supposed to lay eggs but seeing a male happened when we boarded her while we were out of town.
I have a book by Holger Vetter about sulcatas & leopards in the wild that states the first clutch of eggs are generally larger than later clutches & that the first clucth is less likely to be fertile.
We don't even know if ANY of our girl's eggs are fertile but with her first clutch the eggs were very large compared to the second cluth & all of the eggs in clutch 1 collapsed in the incubator.
Keep that in mind when another clutch happens & you wonder why they look smaller.
Good luck...
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PHRatz