Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.

They could hear the birds well before they could see them. Thousands of sandhill cranes, each standing 3 to 4 feet tall, were calling to one another across a marshy field. Author Georgann Eubanks describes their rattling, scraping cries as “a stick played over a washboard.” Somehow, from inside the blind where Eubanks and her partner, photographer Donna Campbell, were hiding, another photographer was able to spot an endangered whooping crane amid the cacophony of cries and the chaos of flapping wings. Today, some 800 whooping cranes exist in the wilds of North America. Eubanks couldn’t believe she’d seen one.

“Tears came to my eyes,” she says. “Back in elementary school in Atlanta, I’d learned how this endangered bird might not exist by the time I was an adult. Seeing one just knocked my socks off.”

Although she was born and raised in Georgia, Eubanks has lived in North Carolina since enrolling at Duke University in 1973. Since then, she’s dedicated her career to preserving the legacy of her adopted state.

Since 2007, she’s published six books chronicling the state’s disappearing cultural and literary landscapes. Her first book, Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains, is a travel guide to authors’ hometowns and the places they’ve immortalized on the page. She went on to write two similar titles that cover writers from the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, too.

“Over the years, I think I’ve become more passionate about preservation as the state loses parts of its history,” Eubanks says. “While working on the literary trails books, I would go to a place that I’d read about, and there was no longer a ‘there’ there. I was left imagining these missing places through the writer’s words.”

illustration by Andrea Cheung

Aside from her passion for preservation, another constant in Eubanks’s career is her decades-long partnership with Campbell, a native North Carolinian who spent years in television production before expanding into photography.

“Donna is a fabulous interviewer because of her video experience,” Eubanks says. “She’s able to relate to people and put them at ease so they’re more likely to talk to me when she starts shooting photos.”

The duo’s latest project, The Fabulous Ordinary: Discovering the Natural Wonders of the Wild South, conveys the need to protect the fragile environments that define our landscapes.

“In my earlier books, I focused on our identity as a state. In this book, I’m looking at our identity as a region,” Eubanks says. “The more of the natural world we lose, the more we lose of ourselves. It’s really important, especially for young people, to experience the natural phenomena that happen here and, in some cases, only happen here.”

One such phenomenon is captured in the book’s closing essay about the tundra swans and snow geese that travel each year from the Arctic to the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge near Columbia.

“The word ‘awesome’ is overused,” Campbell says, “but that’s the only word I can find.”

Eubanks agrees: “We could see the geese and swans on the far side of the lake, almost like a white chalk line,” she says. “And then, all at once, they just took flight, thousands of them. It was like somebody waved a white scarf toward the sky. And then they were gone.”

Here and then gone. The work of Eubanks and Campbell reminds us to hold on to the things that matter for as long as we can. You never know when they might disappear.

Savor Nature

photograph by Matt Hulsman

In her new collection of essays, The Fabulous Ordinary: Discovering the Natural Wonders of the Wild South, Georgann Eubanks tracks wildlife like bald eagles and bugling elk as she moves through diverse Southern landscapes, from the mountains of North Carolina to the swamps of Florida. Along the way, she encounters a rich cast of human characters, like the Georgia biologist who’s able to identify, over the phone, the calls of the frogs that congregate in a retention pond near Eubanks’s home in Carrboro. Her wonderful, moving essays about the importance of cherishing and preserving the natural world are accompanied by Donna Campbell’s vivid photography which brings these landscapes to life.

More to Explore: Hear Georgann Eubanks and Donna Campbell in episodes out July 1 and 15. Listen at ourstate.com/podcasts.