From Laurel Hill to Siler’s Bog: the Walking Adventures of a Naturalist, by John K. Terris (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1969; reprint edition 1993; out of print, but available)
John Terres arrived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in January 1961, hoping to finish his “half-million word encyclopedia of North American birds.” While there, on the recommendation of a friend, he started walking the 600 “wild acres” of the Mason Farm Biological Research Reserve, owned by the University of North Carolina. Each day, Terres would walk the farm and then record his observations, never thinking that his notes would become a book. Within a few years, though, he found that he’d already written “300,000 words” and decided that he was well on his way to completing a book about the landscape he now knew intimately. Winner of the 1971 John Burroughs Medal, From Laurel Hill to Siler’s Bog: the Walking Adventures of a Naturalist follows the seasons of Mason Farm, beginning with the “hope” of January and ending in the “long, brilliantly starred cold nights of December.” Readers are introduced to the life there – gray foxes, vultures, owls, cottontails, hawks, muskrats, golden mice, racoons, quail, flying squirrels, turkeys – and their habitats. Joining Terres in the pages of From Laurel Hill to Siler’s Bog is almost as good as being there, but not quite. If you have a chance, make arrangements to walk the landscape that Terres did, with Laurel Hill to Siler’s Bog in hand.
Related Website
Mason Farm Biological Reserve
“In March the Carolina winds blow wildest over the naked sleeping fields, then moan through leafless Big Oak Woods with the sound of a rushing train. For days, Morgan Creek, swollen and muddy from fields washed by the spring deluge, roars like a giant. The placid stream of winter, now yellowed and transformed, rises above its banks, tearing at the groves of sycamores and river birches that mark its course through the low-hill country. It is a time, while the fields lie sodden under stormy March skies, that the big black turkey vultures return to the Old Mason Farm at Chapel Hill.” – from From Laurel Hill to Siler’s Bog, by John K. Terres
(Photograph from North Carolina Botanical Garden, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)