Old School Incubating

[anatess]

I let my only female breeding do it herself (mostly) last year. I started with five good eggs. She rolled two out after a day or so and I marked them and put them back. She pushed them out again within a day and they soon went bad. About three weeks later I (she) was down to two eggs. Both hatched but one had to be put down it was kinked bad. I'm planning on having an incubator setup this year.

It is possible that those 2 eggs were bad that's why mama snake rolled them out. Bad eggs will go bad even in the incubator. Kinked snakes, snakes wrapped in its umbilical cord, snake with 2 heads, snake with its heart on the outside... all these things happen in the incubator.

But yeah, the good thing about using the incubator is you get to control the entire thing yourself so that if an egg goes bad there's no question about it.

And yes, that's the bad thing about maternal incubation too. The mama snake has control, we're just the sidekick, so that if an egg goes bad, we are always left to wonder if mama snake is to blame.