Hello everybody! This week we had our second-to-last week, and we did some more trapping to wrap up our numbers for the summer. As researchers, we aim to have an amount of captures every year to accurately assess our turtle populations and develop reliable statistical analyses. Fortunately, this year has been a very fruitful one [...]
Another successful Blanding’s Bowl! We had an exciting first week of July with our Blanding’s Bowl Competition, where the WEL team, Lake County, and others battled for the Championship title on the largest turtle trapping week of the summer. Folks from the WEL vet team, Lake County, Cook County, Eastern Box Turtle Team, Ornate [...]
It's photo dump week! For this week's post, I decided to comb through my photo album of wayyy too many field pictures and share some of my favorites. This week, we were trapping and caught Blanding’s, painted, and snapping turtles. I loved seeing this juvenile snapper in a trap. As part of our physical [...]
This week Lake County had some quieter days trapping turtles on our field sites. However, we caught some of the most lovable turtles in our traps. Check out this juvenile Common snapping turtle and the Painted turtle twins. [...]
We were excited to have some friends visit us this week! Maddy, the Walder Turtle vet student, joined us in Lake County to help us trap and track. We have ten telemetered turtles at one of our sites, and we sample them each once a month. This helps us see how their bloodwork changes over [...]
What a week! We’ve examined many turtle friends, and the summer is really taking off. This past week Marg and I were back together on my favorite field site. It was such a delight seeing the various ponds and all the prairie plants blooming and growing. Outside of turtles, I also loved stumbling upon frogs, [...]
This week, we focused on trapping at a headstart release site. We found a bunch of Blanding’s there last year, and I was excited to see who we would re-trap! Javelis and I set out with 20 traps each and went to four different ponds. It was fun seeing new faces, such as Pineapple (who [...]
Hello, I’m Javelis! I’m the rising second year vet student joining Marg this summer in the Lake County Aquatic Team! It’s only been 2 weeks since we started, and I feel like I have already learned so much. This week Marg and I joined the USDA in trapping and assessing turtles in one of our [...]
Back for another year of turtle work at Lake County! I miss my friend Varun but he is now a fourth year vet student and on rotations. This year I am with Javelis, a first year student who is no stranger to field work. It’s only been a couple days, but we are having a [...]
