Back at it again this week with another return to the swamp for the 9th Annual Blanding's Bowl with the Lake County crew. Every team of biologists, vets, and students set out traps at the beginning of the week and spent the rest of the time checking traps and tallying points. The stars of the [...]
Dr. Kaitlin, Chris, and I set up traps on Monday to kick-start the week. Since the weather was looking very iffy for the next few days, we decided that we shouldn’t move our traps to a new location just yet. If a storm were to come through, we knew that our current traps were nice [...]
A short story by Vroom ‘Twas certainly a week. A hot and humid one at that. Temperatures rose up to 95F last week, with the RealFeel at a consistent 108F. We just wanted to find our turtles - was that too much to ask? Alas, fate had other plans for us. Sunday began innocently enough, [...]
One of the best things about working with wildlife is that you never know what the week is going to throw at you. This past week Maris and I took a break from our work in the lab at school and headed up to the Chicagoland area to join the other turtle teams. We started [...]
On Tuesday, Dr. Kaitlin and I ventured out into the rivers of Cook County to set up our traps for the week. It only took about an hour, so we were free for the rest of the day! Chris, the biologist for Cook County, invited us to help him with osprey tagging. The best part [...]
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 [...]
