This week, we had some visitors from the Reinke Lab of Northeastern Illinois University! Led by Dr. Beth Reinke, the lab typically studies painted turtles at a field site in northern Wisconsin. This year though, one of the lab's students, Gail, has been with us in the field working on their project on Blanding's turtle [...]
Nothing I write in this blog will hold a candle to the saga penned by my Blanding's compatriot Sathvik last week. In an effort to creatively compare, this week's blog post will be written exclusively in the ancient art form of the haiku. -- When turtle tracking, Found a weird looking turtle. They call him Flat [...]
Perhaps the most important event in wildlife-based competition happened last week: Blanding's Bowl! Before we recap the 13th annual edition of this competition, let me catch you up to speed on what Blanding's Bowl is. Originally conceived by Blanding's turtle forefather Gary Glowacki in 2013, the once simple celebratory competition between Lake County technicians has [...]
Sorry for the delay on this update! We have been very busy making sure we are prepared for next week's Blandings Bowl! -- Though Lake County was spared the worst of the scary Illinois weather last week, rain still affected our ability to catch and sample as many turtles as we would have liked. While [...]
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 [...]
