Conservation efforts provide forever memories.

Byline: John Rezell The Register-Guard

Some moments in life stir emotions magically inside you, and become etched in your mind forever.

I'm pretty certain that Sierra watching Old Faithful blow this summer on her birthday will be one of those forever memories.

That thought popped into my mind as we pulled to the side of the Grand Loop in Yellowstone National Park about an hour later on our way to West Yellowstone during our vacation.

We rolled to a stop and excitedly grabbed all our camera equipment. Out in the field, some 50 yards away, a pair of huge whooping cranes grazed in the long grass.

The girls recorded the event for our archives.

I wiped tears from my eyes.

It wasn't just the whooping cranes that hit me deep, but those many forever memories.

Just minutes after rolling into the park beneath the famous archway at the north entrance that proclaims "For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People" a few days earlier, we saw a bald eagle perched in a distant tree.

A day or so later, we rolled through countless bison lining the Grand Loop in Hayden Valley.

Each image thrilled me, taking me back two years ago to the Grand Canyon and the chill that rushed up my spine as I watched California condors soaring majestically in the breeze at Mather Point.

And back to our arrival in Oregon a few months after that, enjoying osprey swoop over Diamond Lake on a crystal clear summer morning.

All these scintillating sights that, if not for campaigning by some insightful individuals, might never have happened.

See, not so very long ago, when I was a kid, the whooping crane and bald eagle were poster children for all that threatened the natural world as we knew it back then.

Extinction wasn't a word only associated with prehistoric tales of dinosaurs. We were watching possible extinction unfold live, in real time. Whooping cranes. Bald eagles. Bison.

When I was the age of my daughters, the only bald eagles and whooping cranes I ever saw were on the evening news, with experts telling us if we didn't do something, in a few years, no one would see them in the wild.

Of course, there were others who said those experts were full of hot air. Sounding an unnecessary alarm. Prompting society to take drastic measures like, oh, changing the way farmers kill weeds in a field.

Why do it?

Well, so years down the road, the first set of experts said, our children will be able to enjoy the sight of a whooping crane or bald eagle someplace other than a zoo.

I've seen more bald eagles this summer than I did in the first 25 years of my life. I saw my first whooping crane in the wild. Bison galore.

I wrote a children's novel about the return of the California condor a few years back, doing extensive research on the subject, and actually seeing them soar in the Grand Canyon moved me so profoundly, so deeply in ways I still have trouble understanding.

Back in '93, when we first visited Oregon, I remember reading about the efforts to save the osprey and our bubbling excitement when we finally spotted one of the elusive survivors pluck a fish out of a lake.

Memories I'll cherish as long as I live that could just as easily be gone. Forever.

John Rezell, aka, Raz, can be reached at Eugenemeraz @att.net.