Tortlex
Member
Hello all,
I'd like to share my experience with incubating a clutch of rescued sulcata eggs from my mother-in-law's ranch in Tucson this past summer 2018...
My mother-in-law has a dog boarding and breeding business, with enough property to house rescue adult sulcatas too. Although she does not actively breed the tortoises, inevitably some females lay eggs each year. She has always collected the babies and carefully rehomed them to serious tortoise caregivers.
On May 2, 2018, during one of our occasional trips out there to visit from Phoenix, we noticed a rare event! A mother female sulcata in her nest laying her eggs right before our eyes. Rather than let them go full term in the ground, where many of the large dogs would often typically try to dig them up, my wife and I carefully dug them up and immediately placed them into an incubator that we happened to have. We waited for the mother to be completely done with her nesting before carefully removing each one. We rescued 32 eggs from the nest...
Some were inevitably cracked from the nesting process, but we still gave them a chance to hatch. The 7 that were cracked were infertile and never chalked, and two uncracked ones turned out to be infertile as well. We were amazed that after a little over 3 months, we had 22 beautiful and healthy sulcata hatchling babies...
They started hatching on August 12, 2018...
...and we had a full group within about 2 weeks time with a couple outliers near the end of August.
I had been reading and learning about the proper care of hatchling babies for quite some time a as reader here for a couple years before joining recently. I already owned two older sulcatas from hatchling age 2 years prior and had taken great care in creating the proper conditions for them from the information provided by some very seasoned and knowledgeable members here like @Tom and @Yvonne G , just to name a few whose information, experience and knowledge has been extremely helpful. I was dedicated to doing EVERYTHING right.
The daily soaks, proper food gathering and growing of grasses, with as much variety as possible began. From birth, these little guys got the best possible care I could give, striving for perfection in their enclosures, with plenty of humidity, daily UVB and supervised outside time...
I eventually found home for all of the babies, except for 1 baby that I kept...
...his name is Fin...
Oh and one of his siblings is still left over waiting for a great home...
Interestingly enough my mother-in-law found another smaller clutch of hatchling babies emerging in her yard about a month later on September 21st...
..but I'll talk about the cool find in that clutch in a few posts from now...
I'd like to share my experience with incubating a clutch of rescued sulcata eggs from my mother-in-law's ranch in Tucson this past summer 2018...
My mother-in-law has a dog boarding and breeding business, with enough property to house rescue adult sulcatas too. Although she does not actively breed the tortoises, inevitably some females lay eggs each year. She has always collected the babies and carefully rehomed them to serious tortoise caregivers.
On May 2, 2018, during one of our occasional trips out there to visit from Phoenix, we noticed a rare event! A mother female sulcata in her nest laying her eggs right before our eyes. Rather than let them go full term in the ground, where many of the large dogs would often typically try to dig them up, my wife and I carefully dug them up and immediately placed them into an incubator that we happened to have. We waited for the mother to be completely done with her nesting before carefully removing each one. We rescued 32 eggs from the nest...
Some were inevitably cracked from the nesting process, but we still gave them a chance to hatch. The 7 that were cracked were infertile and never chalked, and two uncracked ones turned out to be infertile as well. We were amazed that after a little over 3 months, we had 22 beautiful and healthy sulcata hatchling babies...
They started hatching on August 12, 2018...
...and we had a full group within about 2 weeks time with a couple outliers near the end of August.
I had been reading and learning about the proper care of hatchling babies for quite some time a as reader here for a couple years before joining recently. I already owned two older sulcatas from hatchling age 2 years prior and had taken great care in creating the proper conditions for them from the information provided by some very seasoned and knowledgeable members here like @Tom and @Yvonne G , just to name a few whose information, experience and knowledge has been extremely helpful. I was dedicated to doing EVERYTHING right.
The daily soaks, proper food gathering and growing of grasses, with as much variety as possible began. From birth, these little guys got the best possible care I could give, striving for perfection in their enclosures, with plenty of humidity, daily UVB and supervised outside time...
I eventually found home for all of the babies, except for 1 baby that I kept...
...his name is Fin...
Oh and one of his siblings is still left over waiting for a great home...
Interestingly enough my mother-in-law found another smaller clutch of hatchling babies emerging in her yard about a month later on September 21st...
..but I'll talk about the cool find in that clutch in a few posts from now...