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 [...]
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 [...]
Just a cute headstart as compensation for the delayed blog! Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It's been a while but I've been up to some pretty amazing stuff while saving the world all at the same time. Three weeks ago, we discovered that there were 35 headstarts up in Lake County that needed [...]
My derpy roadtrip buddy With no turtles to track or trap this week, the team and I were able to catch up on some things in the office. I finally stained all of the blood smears that I have made over the past month, and with 120+ slides this was quite a task. [...]
Welcome back to the Lake Co blog! We wanted to use this blog to shout out all of the amazing, hardworking people who help us help Blanding's! Last week the Lake County Blanding's team, Kane County Blanding's team, and the Box Turtle team all joined forces to sample 125 headstarted Blanding's turtles that were [...]
A male painted turtle shows off his claws This week was all about Painted Turtles! John, the conservation biologist from last week, and I set up Promar traps in ponds to test for any uptake of lead in turtles caused by their use of the varied habitats surrounding the area. This information is [...]
This week I swapped my hiking boots for waders and set out to find spotted turtles in the swamps of Camp Edwards. This is the very first-time spotted turtles have been sampled in the Wildlife Epi Lab! John, a conservation biologist working under the Department of Defense Legacy Grant and graduate student at Antioch University, [...]
