It’s a beautiful Monday afternoon, the blue sky reflected in the glassy surface of a small pond on the Pyramid Bench. Suddenly, a shrill cry breaks the silence.

“They caught another frog!” A young voice exclaims, as her classmates thrash through the tall grass to get a closer look at the amphibian in question.

For Paulette Trottier’s Grade 2 class at Jasper Elementary, the pond study afternoon is a chance to don rubber boots, grab a makeshift net and get up close and personal with the the various creatures of the aquatic community. For Jasper National Park aquatic specialist Ward Hughson, it’s just another day at the office.

“This is the job I wanted when I was playing with rubber boots when I was five years old,” Hughson reveals during a quiet moment on the walk towards the pond. “I’m never in the field as much as I’d like to be — but I try to get involved in as many of the field projects as I can,” he adds. That doesn’t always mean counting specimens all by his lonesome. Take today for instance, when he will introduce the wonders of his watery world to an enthusiastic young audience.

As the group gathers by the edge of the pond, Hughson begins by asking the class if they know what a community is. 

Nodding heads all around.

“Does everyone in your community, in your class, eat the same food?” Hughson asks. “Do your parents all do the same jobs?” This time, the group chorus responds in the negative. Before he turns them loose along the muddy shoreline, Hughson is teaching the class some basic lessons about the aquatic ecosystem they are about to explore.

And explore they do — one intrepid frog hunter gets almost waist deep during his pursuit, while others bemoan not having a spare pair of socks. But these are minor inconveniences compared to the thrill of holding a live frog in your bare hands. This class is lucky. After the first frog spotted makes an acrobatic escape from a net, two more specimens are discovered and taken into custody — an old ice cream pail partly full of water and other creatures of the realm, a leech here, a snail there.

While Trottier, Hughson and naturalist Volker Schelhaus encourage the students to search for all the various insects and other lifeforms on their handy-dandy identification sheets, the frogs are the star attraction. A crowd of second graders circle Hughson as he cups the small animal in his hands, waiting for their turn. It’s nice to see such enthusiasm, Hughson says, and that could be one of the reasons he keeps coming back to help with the pond study year after year. It does have a long history, and while none of Schelaus, Trottier or Hughson can say exactly how many years the Jasper Elementary students have been spending an afternoon living the life aquatic, Trottier has at least one benchmark to measure the years by.

“My daughters did it too,” she says. “It’s always a highlight.”

It’s clearly a highlight for Hughson, too.

When it comes to public education and awareness of the aquatic environment in the national park, he admits that Parks doesn’t do as much as they’d like.

“Bringing that whole awareness up is one of our goals, but it’s really hard to do. I’m always looking for neat ways to do it, so I’m not just checking the box in the management plan,” he says. Mission accomplished. Just ask the Grade 2 class at Jasper Elementary School.