Week Overview: We survived our first week of the summer field season! The week was full of ups (catching turtles) and downs (falling in the marsh). We finished the week with a total of 14 Blanding’s turtles, 7 Painted turtles, and 5 Common Snapping Turtles. The turtles were captured using multiple methods: trap setting [...]
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 [...]
Recently in the field, we encountered numerous turtle shells left behind from previous mortality events. While these discoveries can initially feel discouraging, they also represent an important opportunity for wildlife disease surveillance. Even when soft tissues are long gone and all that remains is shell and bone, there is often still valuable information preserved that [...]
Hey All, We're supper excited to start this season off of aquatic turtles in cook county on Monday with snakes... But the rest of the week we'll start to develop new skills and dust off old ones at one of our amazing aquatic turtle sites! we're looking forward to the summer and our next update [...]
Hey All, We're supper excited to start this season off of aquatic turtles in cook county on Monday with snakes... But the rest of the week we'll start to develop new skills and dust off old ones at one of our amazing aquatic turtle sites! we're looking forward to the summer and our next update [...]
Shell We Begin? Meet Grace! Hello! My name is Grace, I just finished my second year of veterinary school at the U of I (halfway done!) and am very excited to be back in the field with the Kane County team for my second summer. As for a little bit about me: I grew up [...]
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 [...]
Introducing the Box Turtle Team Leaders of 2026!! Turtle season is officially back, and we could not be more excited! Over the next few months, we’ll be spending our days trekking through forests, prairies, wetlands, and field sites across Illinois in search of eastern (and occasionally ornate) [...]
Hey, everyone! It's been a super busy past couple of weeks, as we've been in the field quite a bit, tracking our own ornate box turtles and helping out with the last week of Eastern Box Turtle Team! Just wanted to pop in and give some updates on what we've been up to. Last week [...]
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 [...]
