{"id":6462,"date":"2024-07-08T12:37:53","date_gmt":"2024-07-08T17:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vetmed.illinois.edu\/wel\/?p=6462"},"modified":"2024-07-08T12:37:53","modified_gmt":"2024-07-08T17:37:53","slug":"adventures-at-blandings-bowl-for-an-ornate-gal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vetmed.illinois.edu\/wel\/adventures-at-blandings-bowl-for-an-ornate-gal\/","title":{"rendered":"Adventures at Blanding\u2019s Bowl for an Ornate Gal"},"content":{"rendered":"

What does a week of aquatic turtle work look like for an ornate box turtle gal? Pretty much just a lot of water…<\/span><\/p>\n

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Marg and Maddie<\/p><\/div>\n

This past week, one of our ornate team members, Maddie, joined Lake County veterinary students and biologists and competed in this year\u2019s Blanding\u2019s Bowl! Blanding\u2019s Bowl is a yearly tradition where teams split off to set traps and see who can catch the highest number of blanding’s throughout the week. This week was a whole lot of fun from trekking through thigh high mud in leaky waders, to learning how to play card games late at night in a field building, AND WINNING SECOND PLACE! \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s right, this land turtle girl, alongside her Lake County vet student partner, Marg, put our hand capturing and trap setting skills to the test and came out in second! Although this week was a hard one for trapping due to the heavy rains that we got, we took some risks with our traps and it worked out. Marg, being an expert of the habitat there, wanted to try a new spot that they had seen some blanding\u2019s in, but had not explored much of yet. So we set up 5 traps down a fire road, 6 by the beaver dam, and 5 in a notoriously turtley place called \u201cLover\u2019s Lane\u201d. After the hard work of the first day, our team, the \u201cGluten Free Blanding\u2019s Spree\u201d (a great team name for 2 celiacs), felt good about the traps we set and all the blanding\u2019s that we were going to catch! <\/span><\/p>\n

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A 60 point turtle!<\/p><\/div>\n

Tuesday morning we woke up to on and off showers, not a great way to start the day. Waders filled with water already, squishing in my boots, we made our way to our first set of 5 traps. Lo and behold, we got 2 new juvenile blanding\u2019s in our first trap! These were some high point turtles, giving us over 120 points in our first trap! Our second trap also had a juvenile blanding\u2019s in it! These turtles, having never been caught before, were extra special because we got to name them. I named our first one, Chalula, after the hot sauce because she was a little spicy, Marg named our second one George, and our third one we named Rowdy Riley.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Meet Chalula!<\/p><\/div>\n

The rest of the day, we caught one more blanding\u2019s turtle. Now it was time to head back to the field building to complete the lab work for all the turtles our teams had caught and sampled that day!<\/span><\/p>\n

Wednesday, the last day of Blanding\u2019s Bowl, we caught 1 blanding\u2019s turtle in our trap, 1 painted turtle, and Marg hand captured one more blanding\u2019s! That brought our total to 199 points! Although we didn’t catch the largest number of blanding\u2019s turtles in our traps, we caught some very valuable turtles. Now Chalula, George, and Rowdy Riley will be identifiable to all biologists and veterinary teams who catch them in the future!<\/span><\/p>\n

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See you next year, Blanding\u2019s Bowl! Next time, I\u2019m taking first!<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What does a week of aquatic turtle work look like for an ornate box turtle gal? Pretty much just a lot of water… This past week, one of our ornate team members, Maddie, joined Lake County veterinary students and biologists and competed in this year\u2019s Blanding\u2019s Bowl! Blanding\u2019s Bowl is a yearly tradition where teams […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1348,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vetmed.illinois.edu\/wel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vetmed.illinois.edu\/wel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vetmed.illinois.edu\/wel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vetmed.illinois.edu\/wel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1348"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vetmed.illinois.edu\/wel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6462"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/vetmed.illinois.edu\/wel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6471,"href":"https:\/\/vetmed.illinois.edu\/wel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6462\/revisions\/6471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vetmed.illinois.edu\/wel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vetmed.illinois.edu\/wel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vetmed.illinois.edu\/wel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}