For 47 years, every single thing my dad and I have ever done together has been outside. Nature was never the backdrop. It was the whole point — and the whole relationship.

Yesterday was Father’s Day. My dad and I drove two hours from Madison to Maquoketa Caves State Park in Iowa — crawling through limestone passages that took ten thousand years of water to carve, ducking under shelves of ancient rock, our voices swallowed by the dark. We walked behind a waterfall pouring straight through a crack in the earth. We stood in chambers so vast they felt like cathedrals.

And all along the trails, the park had posted education signs about bats. I stopped at every one.

The trail into Maquoketa Caves State Park — Iowa’s most cave-dense park, home to federally endangered bat species that have hibernated in these chambers for thousands of years.

My dad and I laughed about it, standing there reading those signs together. Because when we were kids? Bats were terrifying. Bats were rabies. Bats were something that got tangled in your hair. Every horror movie, every Halloween decoration, every adult warning — bats were the villain of the natural world.

The signs changed that. Clear, simple, joyful signs explaining what bats actually do. How a single bat eats thousands of mosquitoes a night. How they pollinate crops and disperse seeds and hold entire ecosystems together with their silent, fast, unremarkable nightly work. How the caves at Maquoketa shelter federally endangered Indiana bats — a species that has roosted in these exact chambers, in this exact darkness, for longer than European settlers have existed on this continent.

Standing there reading those signs with my dad, I felt something shift. Not just in how I saw bats. In how I understood what education does. What wonder does. How you cannot protect what you fear. How the whole game — conservation, advocacy, the fight to keep wild things wild — starts with a sign on a trail that says: look again. Look closer. This creature is not what you thought.

Gray bats in flight — a cave-dependent species that, like the Indiana bat at Maquoketa, has lost most of its federal protection and monitoring as the Trump administration guts wildlife agencies.

My dad, deep inside Maquoketa Caves on Father’s Day. 47 years of wild places, and every one of them still matters.

My dad is in his 70s. In 47 years of going outside together — hiking, caving, sitting still long enough for something wild to forget we were there — every single one of those moments existed because someone, somewhere, fought for the place that made it possible.

Someone protected the watershed above Maquoketa. Someone wrote the education signs. Someone litigated for the Indiana bat’s federal listing. Someone kept the Endangered Species Act standing when it was convenient to let it fall. Those people are why my dad and I could stand in a waterfall yesterday and feel, for a few hours, like the world was still whole.

Now it’s our turn. With federal protections collapsing, state-level advocacy is the last line of defense for species like the Indiana bat — and for wolves, and for every creature that depends on a functioning ecosystem. That is what GLWA does. That is what your donation funds today.

Standing in that cave yesterday, I understood more clearly than I ever have exactly what we are fighting to protect. Not a policy. Not a petition. A bat in the dark above your head, doing