Lawrence Earley

2005 Season

Lawrence S. Earley, former editor of Wildlife in North Carolina magazine, is a freelance writer and photographer living in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Bibliography

Co-editor, Wildlife in North Carolina (1987)
Editor, North Carolina WILD Places: A Closer Look, N. C. Wildlife Resources Commission (1993)
Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest (2004)

Excerpt

Chapter 1
What Bartram Saw

A magnificent grove of stately pines, succeeding to the expansive wild plains we had a long time traversed, had a pleasant effect, rousing the faculties of the mind, awakening the imagination by its sublimity, and arresting every active, inquisitive idea, by the variety of the scenery.

-William Bartram, Travels (1791)

A longleaf pine forest on a bright day is a light and sound show. There's the verdant ground cover, mostly grasses that sway to each hint of breeze. The forest is open with widely scattered trees, and the early morning sun casts angled shadows from the pine trunks; by midday each tree will be standing in its own small pool of shadow. Here and there, dense groups of young pine saplings gather and the tufts of infant pines are nearly indistinguishable from the wiregrass. Above, the sky burns azure. The sound emanates from the treetops, a low and constant tone like the surf crash of a distant sea. Even on a perfectly still day you may hear this roar in the distance, as if somewhere an individual tree was gathering and amplifying some ambient sound. The great eighteenth-century explorer William Bartram described it as "the solemn symphony of the steady Western breezes, playing incessantly, rising and falling through the thick and wavy foliage."[1]

On a sunny morning in April, I've come to the 200-acre Wade Tract Preserve near Thomasville, Georgia, to walk through an old-growth longleaf pine forest. Old-growth longleaf pine is scattered in small pieces throughout the Southeast, unlike the Pacific Northwest where relatively large tracts of old-growth Douglas fir still exist. The Wade Tract is one of these remnant longleaf forests. It's owned by the Arcadia Plantation and managed, through a conservation easement, by Tall Timbers Research Station just down the road. This rolling country is known as the Red Hills region, where erosion over the eons has carved an originally flat plain into pleasant hills and valleys.

Continued...