When I pictured my academic path, I rarely, if ever, thought about turtles. When I tell people I am a vet student, the most common response is: “Aw, you must really like dogs and cats.” And, of course, like most veterinary students (and people in general), I love our fluffy friends. But what about the [...]
Hey hey everyone, welcome back to another Cook County weekly update! I got back from Poland on the 4th of July, and after waiting 3 whole hours for my luggage to emerge from the conveyer belt (of course, it was the last one to come out), I was on my [...]
Back at it again this week with another return to the swamp for the 9th Annual Blanding's Bowl with the Lake County crew. Every team of biologists, vets, and students set out traps at the beginning of the week and spent the rest of the time checking traps and tallying points. The stars of the [...]
Dr. Kaitlin, Chris, and I set up traps on Monday to kick-start the week. Since the weather was looking very iffy for the next few days, we decided that we shouldn’t move our traps to a new location just yet. If a storm were to come through, we knew that our current traps were nice [...]
A short story by Vroom ‘Twas certainly a week. A hot and humid one at that. Temperatures rose up to 95F last week, with the RealFeel at a consistent 108F. We just wanted to find our turtles - was that too much to ask? Alas, fate had other plans for us. Sunday began innocently enough, [...]
One of the best things about working with wildlife is that you never know what the week is going to throw at you. This past week Maris and I took a break from our work in the lab at school and headed up to the Chicagoland area to join the other turtle teams. We started [...]
On Tuesday, Dr. Kaitlin and I ventured out into the rivers of Cook County to set up our traps for the week. It only took about an hour, so we were free for the rest of the day! Chris, the biologist for Cook County, invited us to help him with osprey tagging. The best part [...]
Welcome back to more Cook County adventures! This week, our goal was to set up traps for soft shells and hopefully catch a few of them! On Tuesday, we went out to set traps. Because it didn’t take us long to set them up, Dr. Kaitlin and I got invited to help with fawning! We [...]
After 2 weeks, I’m learning that fieldwork is all about small victories. Wading through the marsh without tripping, successfully drawing blood on the first try, winning an arm wrestle with a turtle in order to perform an oral swab, each small feat is worth celebrating. Dylan wrestling with the Kane Co. Blandings On Wednesday [...]
Tuesday: With this week being shorter due to the holiday, we hit the ground running in Spring Bluff. We set up 22 traps total at two separate sites and tracked some of the female adult turtles in a location called Lovers Lane. We are almost to the nesting season so weekly weight checks and gravid [...]
