Iris starts digging her nest.
Here comes the first egg...
Plop!
Covering up the nest.
Set in the incubator.
0955 AM: Iris begins digging a second nest, this time outside the hide house. I remove Joey, give him a nice long soak in the slop sink, then park him in a large rubbermaid box for the duration, where he can pace and smoke like any expectant father :)
0955 AM to 0630 PM: Iris digs her nest. Using one back leg at a time, she slowly pushes dirt to either side and to the rear in an area slightly wider than her body. Each leg makes two or three swipes, then she switches to the other leg. After nearly ninety minutes, she has scraped away almost two inches of soil,and now she changes her digging tactics. She begins working on a small area directly below her tail, about four inches wide. Several hours pass and the narrower section is a few inches deep, and Iris now uses the 'ledge' where the hole narrows to rest each leg while the other is digging (!) This also seems to give her additional leverage. Eventually, the hole is deep enough that her digging feet no longer encounter dirt, so she stops, repositions herself, and takes the 'ledges' down another inch or so, and then resumes digging (!)
By 0630 PM, Iris has a seven inch deep hole she is partway into,and looks like a geodesic dome house sliding into the San Andreas Fault. For the next twenty minutes, she swipes each hind foot by turns around the hole - it looks like she's checking to make sure it's the right size. Then she stopped, and rested for a few minutes. Then she began to raise and lower her body by flexing her back legs, looking to me like a rhythmic contraction of sorts. Then her tail points down and I see a bit of white...doesn't seem to be much of an ovipositor, I'm thinking, when Plop! the first egg drops into the hole! I shout a bit and take pictures - I'll do the Redfoot Dance later. I manage to catch the second egg on film halfway out,and it drops and clicks against the first egg. Uh-oh! I decide to remove the eggs to prevent any accidents, and carefully reach in under Iris and pull them out. Now Iris sticks her hind feet down in the hole, fishing around for eggs...I'm guessing she wants to move them so she can drop another. "Hey, somebody get me a chicken egg!" I shout upstairs. I place the chicken egg in the hole and sure enough, Iris moves it forward in the hole towards her head, and then drops a third egg. I remove it and move the chicken egg back so Iris can push it forward again...Using chicken eggs is probably not necessary.
0745 PM: Iris has laid her fifth and final egg, and now begins to fill in the hole (contents: one chicken egg). She is quite exhausted, and takes a breath with each leg swipe, a reversal of the day's excavation technique. I help her out by tossing in a double handful of dirt with each leg swipe, and after about twenty minutes she is satisfied that her eggs are sufficiently buried. She takes a deep drink of water and heads for bed in her hide house, and I put Joey back in (they usually sleep head to head, shells almost touching). I put the five eggs in a container with several inches of damp vermiculite and stow them away in a warm place for the night. It's now 0930 PM, and it's been a long day for all concerned!
Now after the long day comes the long wait, the incubation period which lasts around 150 days...
Success!