An alpine wetland in Rocky Mountain National Park. May 2023. 9:08 p.m. It's dark. It's raining. The only light comes from our headlamps sweeping back and forth across the marsh as we search for our first signs of Colorado's state-endangered boreal toad (Anaxyrus boreas boreas). Somewhere out there, the males are singing. We can hear them, but they're masters of disappearing into the darkness. They don't want to be seen. Our job is to find them anyway. Every toad we catch is carefully PIT tagged so we can recognize it if it's found again in future years, then swabbed for the devastating chytrid fungus. If we're lucky, we might even find egg strings to send to a hatchery, where they'll have a better chance of surviving than they would in the wild. Tonight, every toad matters. This was one of the most exciting jobs I'd ever had as a young wildlife biologist.
We keep walking. The rain falls harder. Every rustle in the grass makes us swing our lights around, only to find another clump of sedges waving in the wind. The chorus of calls continues somewhere ahead of us. Then I see movement. A male boreal toad, out for a nighttime stroll, searching for the romantic partner who might help save his rapidly disappearing species. I rush toward him and gently scoop him up with both hands, grinning from ear to ear. We're going to save your species, little guy. He screams his objection right back at me.
As I stood there holding this tiny, grumpy amphibian in the palm of my hand, I remember thinking, This is it. This is how I was going to change the world. One PIT tag. One chytrid swab. One very angry little toad at a time. I had no idea that a year and a half later I would find myself standing in front of a classroom instead of a wetland, and that teaching would completely change the way I thought about conservation.
Mrs. Gray's Classroom. August 2024. 7:45 a.m. Thirty seventh graders are staring back at me. I glance down at my lesson plan one last time before looking back up at the classroom. Today we're talking about biology, something I know well enough to spend hours discussing with other biologists in the field. Somehow, teaching it feels entirely different. I feel like an imposter. A few months earlier I had been hiking through thunderstorms, snowshoeing eleven miles to alpine wetlands, and even standing my ground while three moose chased me down a trail. None of that intimidated me quite like introducing myself to thirty twelve-year-olds.
As I welcomed my first class, I couldn't shake the feeling that I had taken a step backward. I missed the field. I missed the late nights chasing amphibian calls through marshes. I missed collecting data that felt like it was becoming part of something bigger than myself. Somewhere along the way, I had convinced myself that conservation only happened in wetlands, hatcheries, and research stations. Real biologists published papers. They collected data. They discovered things no one else had discovered before. Maybe, if they were lucky, one of those publications would even change the course of biology forever. Teaching felt different. As I looked around the classroom, I wondered what thirty middle schoolers could possibly have to do with conserving amphibians. No going back now, I thought, as I introduced myself.
Mrs. Gray's Classroom. November 2024. 10:12 a.m. By November, I had settled into teaching. I no longer felt like a field biologist pretending to be a science teacher. My students knew about the months I'd spent chasing amphibians through alpine wetlands, and they loved asking questions about life in the field. Whenever someone inevitably asked, "When are we ever going to use this?" I usually had a muddy story, a wildlife encounter, or a field mishap ready to answer them. It earned me a surprising amount of credibility with a room full of seventh graders. Even then, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd left conservation behind.
Then one morning, while we were talking about ecosystems, a hand went up. "Mrs. Gray," a student asked, "why are some frogs disappearing?" The lesson stopped. We talked about habitat loss. Disease. Climate change. We talked about why amphibians are often the first animals to tell us when an ecosystem is in trouble. We talked about what scientists are doing to help, and what ordinary people can do, too. As I looked around the room, something clicked. A year earlier, I had been thrilled to find one endangered boreal toad in the dark. Now I had thirty students asking the kinds of questions that lead people into conservation in the first place. The questions were different. The mission wasn't. I realized then that conservation doesn't begin when someone picks up a PIT tag reader or publishes a paper. It begins much earlier, with curiosity. With someone asking, "How did that salamander get here?" or "Why is that frog green?" Every scientist, every educator, every conservationist starts the same way. With wonder.
Mrs. Gray's Inbox. June 2025. 8:17 p.m. The school year had been over for a few weeks when an email popped into my inbox from one of my seventh graders.
During one of my trips I visited Yellowstone and officially realized the nerd you made me into (I love rocks).
I laughed out loud. Of all the things I thought my students would remember from seventh grade science, I never imagined it would be a newfound appreciation for geology. I replied to his email with a smile, but after closing my laptop I kept thinking about it. The email wasn't really about rocks. It was about curiosity.
Throughout the school year, little moments like that happened all the time. On Monday mornings, students would race into my classroom to tell me about a bird they had seen over the weekend, a strange mushroom growing in their backyard, or a snake they spotted while hiking with their family. Others would excitedly tell me that someone had asked them about wildlife biology, and they couldn't wait to share that their science teacher used to chase frogs through the Rocky Mountains and somehow survived being followed by three moose.
Somewhere along the way, science had stopped being a subject they memorized for a test. They had started noticing, and that's when it finally clicked. For years, I had measured conservation by the number of wetlands surveyed, amphibians PIT tagged, or datasets collected. Those things matter deeply, and they always will. But sitting in that classroom every day, I realized I had been overlooking another kind of conservation work entirely. Every question a student asked was the beginning of scientific thinking. "Why is this frog slimy?" "How did that salamander end up here?" "What would happen if this wetland disappeared?" Those weren't interruptions to the lesson. They were the lesson. Every conservation project I've ever worked on started with someone asking a question about the natural world. Before there are research papers, recovery plans, habitat restoration projects, or endangered species programs, there is simply curiosity. Someone noticed something. Someone cared enough to ask why. As it turns out, I wasn't teaching thirty middle schoolers about science. I was helping create thirty future question askers.
Cuenca, Ecuador. August 2026. 6:14 a.m. The sun hasn't quite made it over the Andes yet. The city is just beginning to wake up, but I'm already outside with my binoculars around my neck. A Rufous-collared Sparrow sings from a rooftop. Hummingbirds dart between flowers and feeders in my balcony garden. Somewhere in the distance, another unfamiliar bird calls, and I make a mental note to identify it later.
It's funny how life turns out. A few years ago, I was convinced conservation had to look a certain way. It meant muddy boots, mosquito bites, late nights in alpine wetlands, and data sheets filled with PIT tag numbers. If I wasn't in the field collecting data, I worried I had somehow stepped away from conservation. I couldn't have been more wrong.
Today, I live in Cuenca, Ecuador. Most mornings begin with binoculars instead of PIT tags. I still stop to admire every frog I find, and I still feel the same excitement I did in Rocky Mountain National Park. But now I understand that conservation is bigger than one field season or one career path. Sometimes it looks like collecting data. Sometimes it looks like explaining a food web to a twelve-year-old. Sometimes it looks like writing an article like this, hoping someone else sees a place for themselves in conservation too.
I still think about that little male boreal toad. At the time, I believed saving his species meant catching him, swabbing him for chytrid, implanting a PIT tag, and hoping the next generation would have a better chance than the last. I still believe those things matter. They always will. But now I also believe conservation happens every time someone learns to notice. It happens when a student emails their old science teacher from Yellowstone because they're suddenly fascinated by rocks. It happens when a child points out a frog on a hike instead of walking past it. It happens when someone asks why instead of looking away.
Every researcher, educator, volunteer, communicator, and field technician is part of the same ecosystem. None of us can do it alone. Conservation doesn't belong to one profession. It belongs to anyone willing to care enough to ask questions, share stories, and help others fall in love with the natural world. That grumpy little boreal toad probably has no idea he changed my life. I thought I was helping save his species. Instead, he taught me what conservation really looks like.