Seeing as Dr. Allender is away on vacation with no service, we are taking the rare opportunity to talk about something other than turtles (gasp!). Here in Lake County, we don't just catch turtles in our traps (and we care about EVERYTHING we catch... except molluscs, insects, etc). Using our database mECO, we log every [...]

Both Jenna and Sathvik had a good week in the field, joined by some friends from the Terrestrial Turtle Team! Here are their updates: Sathvik: To start off the week, Gail (part of the NEIU turtle team and helping with the Blanding's project as well!) and I were left to track down some of our [...]

Since Jenna is away on vacation this week, you get a purely Sathvik post (for better or worse!). This week, we swapped field sites to one of the release sites for Lake County's Blanding's turtle headstart programs. Luckily, we caught two turtles that were part of the headstart program! To understand the importance of the [...]

Lake County has finished our first week in the field... and I think we can call it a success! We caught and sampled 16 Blanding's turtles, 2 painted turtles, and a snapping turtle this week, along with a new species for me, a garter snake! Even though we set 38 total traps this week, the [...]

Lake County has three main species of interest: the endangered Blanding's turtle, the common snapping turtle, and the painted turtle. We work closely with Lake County Forest Preserves to monitor these populations and their health. Common field activities for us include trapping and sampling turtles, tracking nesting females via radiotelemetry, and doing our work at [...]