About Kami

Kami is a first-year veterinary student at the University of Illinois. She graduated from Auburn University in 2021 with a B.S. in Wildlife Sciences. Kami is interested in zoological and conservation medicine! This summer, she will be conducting health assessments and surveying diseases in musk turtles and softshell turtles!

Jackie, I can’t control the weather!

          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 [...]

Jackie, I can’t control the weather!2022-07-10T14:56:32-05:00

Softshells: Hand Hazard

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 [...]

Softshells: Hand Hazard2022-06-22T15:35:24-05:00

Baby Animal Central

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 [...]

Baby Animal Central2022-06-13T15:06:46-05:00

Luck and Buckets

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 [...]

Luck and Buckets2022-06-08T15:09:27-05:00

Cook County 🤝 Kane County

Monday was probably the busiest day I’ve had so far! Having sampled 14 musk turtles last Friday, I knew I was up for a challenge when I walked in and had 23 more musk turtles to sample and run blood work on. I got to our site very early and started right away, working as [...]

Cook County 🤝 Kane County2022-05-27T14:09:31-05:00

Swamped…literally!

Hello from Cook County! This week we dove right into it by trapping Blanding’s, Sliders, and Musk turtles. Dr. Kaitlin and I kicked off the week with sampling 33 sliders! It was a blast, but we needed an extra hand with all the lab work afterwards so we headed to Kane County and met up [...]

Swamped…literally!2022-05-21T13:06:32-05:00

Countdown to Summer!

Hello and welcome to the turtle-y awesome Cook County blog! You heard that right, this summer is the first summer that the Wildlife Epidemiology Lab will be working alongside Cook County Forest Preserve to save the world one turtle at a time! My name is Kami Grochowski and I am a first year veterinary student [...]

Countdown to Summer!2022-05-15T17:11:50-05:00
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