Category Archives: Eggs

A Five (5) Footed Tortoise?!!!!

You read that correctly.  A baby Eastern Hermann’s hatched January 24th, 2024 with 5 feet.   It is 100% healthy and doing fantastic, its just a little faster than the other babies…We will never know exactly what causes these types of deformities, but a-lot of theories are that it occurs due to genetic mutation, exemplified by […]

Cherry Blossom Season And The Cherries Are Hatching

Cherry blossom trees and cherry head tortoises may seem like two completely unrelated things, but they share one interesting similarity: they both hatch at a particular time of year. In this post, we will explore the differences and similarities between these two phenomena. Cherry Blossom Trees: Cherry blossom trees are native to Japan, but they […]

94.44% success rate for Hatch A Tortoise Instahatch Eggs

Tortstork shipped out its 378th egg this week and it successfully hatched!  Our successful hatch rate is 94.44%.  The failures vary from unknown reasons, but there are some theories.  It could be form mishandling during shipping to not having the right incubator to having too high of  a temperature in the incubator to delays in […]

Conserving a species one tortoise at a time.

Tortstork was honored to be highlighted in the August edition of Neighbors Magazine.  It discusses my goals for colony assurance (captive breeding).  It also talks about how I envision the hatch a tortoise instahatch egg to one day help the conservation of these amazing animals.

Egyptians are starting to hatch

Some of our baby Egyptian eggs are starting to hatch.  I was hoping these would be instahatch eggs and hatch in some lucky person’s incubator.  This Egyptian egg was laid on 5/9/19.  It piped on 7/31/19 and slowly is emerging at a tortoise’s pace. This little tortoise weighs around 4 grams.

HypoTortstork Redfoot hatching

Another Hypo redfoot has joined the future of Tortstork.  This gorgeous little redfoot will be added to the hypo breeding colony we are building.  This amazing orange/red baby is a great addition to our other hypo’s.  Redfoots take 7 to 8 years to mature to breeding size, so we are many years away from a successful […]

100 is in the Egyptian bag!

The 100th instahatch egg was an Egyptian tortoise egg!!!  It was shipped to Gainsville, Florida, 1,000 miles away.  It was laid on 4/20/19, shipped on 6/27/19, delivered on 6/28/19, and started to hatch later that afternoon.  It is doing fantastic and is super active.

Russian Instahatch egg was not rushing to hatch.

Instahatch egg #83 was laid on 4/6/19, shipped to Tulsa, Oklahoma on 6/3/19, delivered on 6/4/19 and started to hatch on 6/22/19. 18 days after delivery.  Talk about a stressful few weeks.  I was confident that it was going to hatch because the customer kept sending me updates of candling pictures and it was progressing […]

Marginated Instahatch #86 climbing out of the deli-cup.

#86 is a Marginated tortoise.  It was laid 4/17/19, shipped to Albany, California on 6/17/19 (2,490 miles away), delivered on 6/18/19, and hatched on 6/20/19.  It was so full of energy it climbed out of its deli cup!!!!!!

Instahatch #85 with a temporary tattoo!

This Sulcata egg was laid on 3/5/19, shipped 6/17/19 to Willows, California, delivered 6/18/19, and hatched the same day!!! When i first started shipping freshly laid eggs, i placed temporary tattoos on the egg.  My success rate for the freshly laid eggs were not very good, which is why i moved away from them and […]