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 Chris and I vs. the humidity, but with the help of cold Gatorades, snacks, and a TON of water, we were able to power through. After sweating buckets tracking turtles every day, I was relieved to come back to our air-conditioned building to process my samples.
On one of our tracking days, Chris found some “Chicken of the Woods” mushrooms in the forest and cut off a little bit so we could try them. Later, Nicole and I made some delish “chicken” parmesan with them, and we were surprised how similar the taste & texture was to actual chicken! We have our fingers crossed that we find some more during our daily hikes.
Sampling a hognose snake
This week was particularly fun because we had a SURPRISE guest in Cape Cod! You probably already guessed who it is, but we were so happy to have Dr. Allender on base to meet the crew in person and see some of our turtles! I’m pretty sure he brought some good luck with him, because while he was here, we found two new box turtles AND a hognose snake. We were especially excited about the hognose because Dr. Allender was able to show us how to take swabs for snake fungal disease and get some samples. The whole Camp Edwards turtle crew was out with us, so we were able to find all the turtles for the day super quickly. This efficiency continued once we returned to the office- since I had Dr. Allender helping me process the samples, we were done in record time.
The Camp Edwards turtle team!!
Nicole, Chris, and I finished up the week tracking some particularly sassy turtles that tried very hard to bite me during sampling. Only one, a new feisty female turtle, outsmarted me and successfully took a chomp on my finger (thank goodness I’m not working with snappers)! Well played, TECA 101, well played.
Total Turtle Count = 130
