Hello readers! Thank you for hanging in there and patiently waiting for this LONG overdue post! I am super excited to give you all an update on my first field week back with the pups! Yes, the John and his dogs joined Turtle Team in May but I was still cramming way too much info [...]
Hi and welcome back to the blog! Last week Kayla and I had great trap success and spend lots of busy days with stacks of Blanding's. However, we did have one (major) hiccup: It was a nice Friday afternoon and I was excited to start fieldwork. I pulled my very first trap of the day [...]
Dr. Allender teaching me the art of the "shell-fie" These past 3 weeks have been spent tracking our Eastern box turtles with radio-transmitters on base for their second round of sampling. This time around was hotter and much more humid than before which slowed us down a bit in the woods. It was [...]
Hello beloved readers! Another exciting week out in the field catching turtles. This week Bill had family vacation, so as the saying goes "while the boss was away the kids decided to play" (also known as work hard). The week started off with one hot and humid Monday. Alexis, Maura, and Joey faced the unruly heat [...]
Hi all and welcome back to the blog! Last week we continued the tradition of participating in Blanding's Bowl - a week when we make work into a game. Each year, everyone who works in the Blanding's Recovery Program sets their own traps and looks for hand captures to earn points. Each Blanding's turtle caught [...]
This week I will be showing you all how I process my samples once I get back to the lab. Whole blood samples get processed as soon as I get back for the day, and swabs/plasma get frozen for further analysis once I get back to the lab in Urbana. Depending on the number of [...]
What am I doing here? What is the meaning of all of this? Ok, don’t worry, this is NOT an existential crisis. I thought I would take a minute this week to show all of you the process I go through when processing box turtles! Each turtle has a different personality and varying levels of [...]
Welcome back readers! This past week the water continued to drop and we had to hike out toward the middle of the marsh to find enough water for our traps. Thursday and Friday we got some of the rain we had been asking for and bundled up accordingly. We were reminded to keep our raincoat [...]
Hi Everyone! We know we’ve been away for awhile but there’s lots of exciting stuff to check out in our vlog! Last week was full of fun-filled field days. We caught PLENTY of Blanding’s, along with many snapping and painted turtles. We also had a very unexpected guest in one of our traps! See [...]
My tiny turtle friend! It was the best of times, it was the worst turtliest of times. What were these two turtles you ask? Spotted & Eastern Box turtles, of course! This was sadly the last week that I got to work with spotted turtles, but it did not disappoint! Like before, we [...]
