This is the fourth year my young Manouria emys emys has fooled with nesting and laying eggs. The first year she just picked a spot out in the yard and started scraping the dirt to make a nest. There wasn't any loose dirt to scrape, so after she had scraped what she figured was long enough, she pooped out the eggs, then started scraping again to cover them up. By the time I realized this was going on all the eggs were broken and mixed in the dirt.
I'm missing one of her nestings from my memory banks, but the one I DO remember , I think it was last year, she deposited all the eggs in the waterer. By the time I found them they were all water logged and no good.
All three of those last 'nestings' were in July, so I was sort of caught off guard when she started nest building a couple three weeks ago. This time she did it right. There were quite a few left over leaves in their yard and she scraped up quite a nice 'hill' inside the shelter. She sat on the hill for a couple weeks, so I figured she had laid the eggs. Yesterday when she was off the nest I got my trusty garden fork and started scraping away the dirt. I got down to the level of the ground and found no eggs. I didn't put the dirt back.
So tonight I'm sitting there n my recliner, watching TV and I kept hearing bumping and banging (the Manouria yard is just outside my window and my recliner is right next to the window). It finally reached the part of my brain that told me I should probably go out there and make sure no one was cast in their stall, so to speak.
The female Manouria was inside the shelter and had a few broken and squashed eggs behind her and she was scraping with her back feet to cover her nest. I probed around behind her and she was actually digging the eggs up as she covered them. I rescued all that weren't broken and came up with forty something.
I cleaned them off and set up the ones I thought weren't too damaged, and I have 35 in the incubator. This year I'm using Hatchrite as the medium. Fingers crossed I can treat them right and in 3 months there will be many cute little Manouria babies running around!
I had a tray of potting soil right next to the shelter, so I set all the eggs in that:
The ones worth salvaging:
The rejects:
I'm missing one of her nestings from my memory banks, but the one I DO remember , I think it was last year, she deposited all the eggs in the waterer. By the time I found them they were all water logged and no good.
All three of those last 'nestings' were in July, so I was sort of caught off guard when she started nest building a couple three weeks ago. This time she did it right. There were quite a few left over leaves in their yard and she scraped up quite a nice 'hill' inside the shelter. She sat on the hill for a couple weeks, so I figured she had laid the eggs. Yesterday when she was off the nest I got my trusty garden fork and started scraping away the dirt. I got down to the level of the ground and found no eggs. I didn't put the dirt back.
So tonight I'm sitting there n my recliner, watching TV and I kept hearing bumping and banging (the Manouria yard is just outside my window and my recliner is right next to the window). It finally reached the part of my brain that told me I should probably go out there and make sure no one was cast in their stall, so to speak.
The female Manouria was inside the shelter and had a few broken and squashed eggs behind her and she was scraping with her back feet to cover her nest. I probed around behind her and she was actually digging the eggs up as she covered them. I rescued all that weren't broken and came up with forty something.
I cleaned them off and set up the ones I thought weren't too damaged, and I have 35 in the incubator. This year I'm using Hatchrite as the medium. Fingers crossed I can treat them right and in 3 months there will be many cute little Manouria babies running around!
I had a tray of potting soil right next to the shelter, so I set all the eggs in that:
The ones worth salvaging:
The rejects: