Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hello all,

Went to feed the torts today and found an EGG in the enclosure!!! I have a 7 year old, 24 pound female and an 8 pound, 3 year old male.

I have a large indoor enclosure with a plywood floor. About a year ago I added a 4'x4' dirt filled addition so that she could dig if needed. She is in it all the time, but it is very difficult to keep any moisture in it because it dries out so fast and when I water it the surface hardens like a giant dirt clod. I wanted to provide a place for her to lay eggs, but this does not seem to be working.

Anyway, my panic is that this is the first egg she has ever produced and she dropped it on the plywood floor of the enclosure, not in the dirt. I checked the dirt carefully and there are no other eggs that I can find. I would imagine that she needs to lay more. Right away this morning I watered the dirt area and stirred up everything real good so that it was nice and moist all the way to the bottom (its about 10" deep).

I have two other problems - First, I have no incubator yet AND I am leaving for out of town tomorrow for 4 days. If she does not lay more eggs today, she might while I am gone, and I don't want them laying around the enclosure, and I don't want her holding them because she has no place to lay them.

WHAT DO I DO? Do I have to overnight an new incubator? Is there a way to keep an egg or eggs for a few days some other way? What do I tell the neighbor boy, who comes over to feed them, to do if he finds eggs? How can I provide a good place to lay eggs indoors?

I knew this was going to happen - AND IT'S AWESOME - but I am not prepared!

PLEASE HELP, Thanks,

Ben

Hello all - thought I would share an update.

It was suggested to me by someone here and my young son to try and put dirt where she is trying to dig, so I cut a hole in the plywood floor and sunk a large tub into the floor so the lip sits on the plywood and filled it with dirt. She came over, snifffed around a long time, walked nearby and tried to dig up the plywood. I moved her over to it again, she did the same thing. The difference now was that she did not even stop digging when I came around - she really wanted to dig. Then I walled off the area she was digging so that she could not go there and placed her back over the dirt. I came back a little later and she had her front legs in the dirt and her rear legs out of the dirt and was digging the plywood just outside the dirt! I gently moved her forward 8 inches so that her back legs were in the dirt this time, she paused, waited, waited, and then started digging in the dirt!!

4 hours, 15 minutes later I went to bed with her still digging, and she was making no new progress because her plastron was sitting on the edge of the plastic tub and her back legs were dangling over the hole - she wanted it deeper but could not get herself down any further. Nothing I could do but cross my fingers.

Long story longer, I got up at 2:30 am to check on her and SHE DID IT! she layed the eggs and covered the hole. The cool thing was that the tub was nearly clear plastic so we could watch her dig from below because she had dug all the dirt away from one side of the tub - up close and personal. She laid 5 new eggs in addition to the one last week.

After she woke up this morning I weighed her and she was down 3 pounds. I gave her a shallow bath and she drank over 3 pounds of water!

Now we just wait.....

Ben