I was up at the Niobrara Valley Preserve much of this week. One morning, I wandered up into the bison pasture to photograph some bugs and flowers. About the time the sun was getting a little intense for macro photos, I decided to drive up the hill to see if any bison were nearby. Sure enough, a small group of 50 or so was quietly grazing a couple hills to the south.

Based on the way the bison were situated and acting, I figured my best chance for photos would come if I went around to the west of them. They were very slowly moving in that direction, and often, I can get way out in front of them and sit still while they calmly work their way past me. The position of the sun meant I was going to be shooting them with backlighting, which is tricky, but can create some really interesting images if I do it right.

Just when I start to think I understand bison and the way they think, they make me feel like a complete fool. I pulled around to the west of the herd, shut off the engine and got out my camera. I glanced up, expecting to see them sauntering over the crest of the hill between us, but instead saw the lead animals thundering down the slope right at me. Wha??

I was in a vehicle, so not in danger, but it was still a little unnerving. I also had very little time to get my shots in. I missed the first wave, but as a second and third portions of the group hit the top of the hill, I was ready. I even managed to get some of them in focus. For you photographers, I was shooting a little dark (the images looked awfully dark on my LCD screen), knowing I’d open up those shadows later in Photoshop. I knew I needed to avoid letting too much light in because I’d lose a lot of details in the background. I’m really happy with the results.

After that crazy 10 or 20 seconds of action, the animals immediately settled down and grazed calmly around me as I caught my breath and took a few more photos. Then they wandered slowly off into the hills again. Just like I knew they would…

I took my son Daniel on a backpacking trip to Colorado last week. The biggest reason I wanted to do that was to carve out some serious one-on-one time with him, which worked out wonderfully. However, I also hoped to add to the list of ‘defining moments’ he’s had in nature. I’m pretty sure that was also accomplished.

I’m not sure if ‘defining moments’ is the exact term I’m looking for here, but what I’m talking about are those events that become significant and permanent positive memories for us. The ones brought up at family gatherings or mentioned during a discussion with friends about significant life experiences. Everyone has those memories; winning a big game, our first kiss, or the first day at a new school or job site.

From a conservation standpoint, we need people to have ‘defining moments’ that include positive experiences with nature – visceral memories that will pop up in their minds when the topic of conservation arises. When they see a news story about prairies being plowed up at record rates, we need people to remember finding a nest of adorable meadowlark chicks or seeing the incredible and wonderful diversity of invertebrates emerging from a sweep net as a naturalist pointed out particularly interesting individuals.

I’m confident my kids have had plenty of those defining moments. They’ve had enough days at work with me or family trips in nature to ensure a conservation ethic is embedded within their brains. I feel great about that, and any additional experiences now are purely icing on that cake.

However, not everyone has ecologists for parents. Not everyone takes regular family vacations in national parks or even gets the chance to hike through a prairie or woodland in the county they live in. In fact, some people haven’t ever had a positive experience with anything they would consider ‘nature’. That’s a huge problem.

There are lots of ways to get people to care about conservation, including (I hope!) deluging them with pretty photos of birds, flowers, and butterflies, accompanied by fascinating stories about the lives of those organisms. Sharing facts about the importance of nature to the everyday lives of humans is good too, including the ways in which healthy ecosystems provide clean air and water, as well as food and other vital resources we need. However, there’s no substitute for personal experience. A ‘defining moment’ that evokes joy, wonder, and pleasure when it’s remembered later might be the most powerful way there is to create a conservation advocate.

My conviction about the importance of defining moments in nature is why I almost never say no to opportunities to lead tours or otherwise interact with people – especially kids – in prairies or other natural settings. It can be hard to quantify the return on my time investment, of course, but I firmly believe in the value of helping people have positive and memorable experiences in nature. If I have to do that 3-5 kids at a time, so be it. However, it’s nice to know countless others are working on this same effort.

During college, I worked as a teacher/naturalist at a local nature center, and regularly led groups of kids and adults on discovery hikes along the center’s trails. We did other programming too, but most of my favorite memories come from hikes for which the main objective was to simply explore and discover – and my role was to facilitate that and help interpret what the hikers found.

I’d love to know what memories stuck in the minds of the kids I interacted with back then. Do they still remember watching a spider wrap up a grasshopper in its web? Do they remember seeing the leaves of sensitive briar fold up when they touched them? Can they still hear the sounds of birds, bees, katydids, and countless other creatures that surrounded us while we closed our eyes and tried to just listen deeply?

Since those days at the nature center, my opportunities to help kids and adults create defining moments have been much more sporadic, but I still see them as a key part of my conservation career. When I lead tours or workshops on plant identification or prairie management, I will always stop to admire and rhapsodize about a toad, spider, grasshopper, or anything else we come across that I think might be of interest to my audience. I never know what might lodge in someone’s brain and become one of the ‘defining moments’ that turns them into a conservation advocate.