Excavation of the eggs

In what turned out to be an all day project, I cleaned out the chameleon's old cage and set her up in a new, taller cage. I took out the sand box and got the eggs out. Now, I'm glad I knew the eggs weren't fertile, because it gave me some liberty with how I handled the eggs. They have soft shells, so they can get squished if digging recklessly. Also, I have read that when you dig up fertile eggs for hatching that you want to separate them and arrange them so they are facing exactly "up" as you found them (mark "up" with a pen when each is uncovered.)

So, here is my practice for if I ever feel like breeding a lizard:

The original layout of the sandbox was a bilayer system. I carved out a little section on one side and filled in the other side with that sand, so there was a little lower section for the lizard to actually fit in for digging. Just so she wasn't sitting on top of the sandbox exposed. The original lower section and tunnel entrance is shaded grey in the picture below. It all got a little destroyed when she filled in everything. The original sand structure was very densely packed; it worked great for this. The tunnels, once dug, did not dry out and cave in as I feared. In fact, the sand at the very bottom of the box was very wet still, almost dripping.
As I was digging I could feel the looser dirt, where she had made tunnels. Her system was more extensive than I had thought. Her clutch ended up being back underneath the original lower area (so there were only scant inches of roof).

So this picture is in the same orientation as the one above, where the egg on the left is just above where her clutch is (though I didn't know it at the time). The egg on the right seems to be a truly lone outlier. Like she was still crapping them out as she was filling in the hole. The depression between the eggs is tunnel:

Now the orientation has rotated 180°. The original lower area of the sandbox is now at the top, in the shaded area. The egg on the left in the above photo is present in this one too, the topmost one of the groups of four. It looks like there were two sections of tunnel that went back underneath the lower area, and one short section that went off the the side:

Here the edge of the clutch has finally been uncovered.

And here is the clutch intact:

There were 23 eggs total, which is perfect. I thought I remember reading the average size for a veiled chameleon is 15-30 eggs, but I could be wrong. I just hope she wasn't too traumatized by her removal from the cage and my throwing her babies in the trash. I don't know, maybe she knew they weren't going to hatch. She'll forgive me when I throw in some crickeys. She always does.