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 [...]
After 2 weeks, I’m learning that fieldwork is all about small victories. Wading through the marsh without tripping, successfully drawing blood on the first try, winning an arm wrestle with a turtle in order to perform an oral swab, each small feat is worth celebrating. Dylan wrestling with the Kane Co. Blandings On Wednesday [...]
Tuesday: With this week being shorter due to the holiday, we hit the ground running in Spring Bluff. We set up 22 traps total at two separate sites and tracked some of the female adult turtles in a location called Lovers Lane. We are almost to the nesting season so weekly weight checks and gravid [...]
We took a quick trip up to our field site in Northwest Illinois to sample ornate box turtles this week, meeting up with the turtle dogs and having super successful sample collection day with 55 turtles! Getting to interact with an amazing conglomeration of biologists and researchers for the betterment of box turtle conservation is [...]
First, some quick introductions of our two veterinary students working at Lake County this summer! My name is Varun Seth (aka Vroom) and I just finished my first year at UIUC Vet Med. I’ve been looking at Blanding’s turtles in Lake County for 2 weeks now. We’ve been tracking turtles, trudging through swamps, and having [...]
When I first began to pursue veterinary school seriously, my mom gifted me the beloved James Herriot books. As I flipped through the pages, I, like many others, began to fall in love with the veterinarian's expeditions through rural England. Every day was different. Every day was magical. Veterinary medicine was exciting in those pages, [...]
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 [...]
Welcome to the first official 2022 Kane County Field Season blog! Here is an update of how the first week back in the field went for Dylan, Bill, myself (Maura), and surprise guests. Monday: The season is certainly in full swing! We were lucky enough to have Bill place traps at one of our sites [...]
The long-awaited return of field season is finally here and with some new faces! Both Maris, having just finished her first year of vet school and entering into her first year in PhD land, and myself kicked off last week at the Nachusa Grasslands, a prairie restoration site in northern Illinois. Reunited with the infamous [...]
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 [...]
