Mara Evans

MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN YOUR HOMETOWN: NEW BOOK GUIDES EVERYDAY PEOPLE ON PRESERVING HISTORICAL STRUCTURESCharlotte, NC (June 3, 2025) Every town has at least one property with an aging original structure that has been abandoned or neglected and needs a little love. Beth Yarbrough, a preservation enthusiast, is sharing her personal passion to return these structures to their former state of glory with her new book, The Grassroots Guide to Saving What Matters: Historic Preservation for Everyday People. In this succinct yet insightful guide, Yarbrough provides a layperson’s roadmap through the building preservation landscape, offering salient tips to anyone looking to protect historic structures in their community.Yarbrough realizes embarking on the journey to preservation can be daunting, especially when pieces of history are at risk. Finding the funds, applying for permits, following the rules, and tracking down original features can quickly get overwhelming. Sometimes it feels pointless—but in fact, “the whole point of The Grassroots Guide is to inspire those who wish they could make a difference and don’t realize that they actually can,” she says.“Many old houses simply die from lack of knowledge. We lose a lot of our best old places because a homeowner is not aware that there is preservation help available. As you read through this book, you will learn what that help looks like, where to find it, and what role it—and you!—can play in saving an old house from an undeserved fate,” Yarbrough says. Yarbrough’s book approaches the process from a thoughtful standpoint, allowing those new to the topic to feel confident in their ability to give a voice to beautiful old structures needing protection as they are guided through the work.Yarbrough hopes her guide will raise awareness of what can be done to protect aging structures, highlight the programs in place that can help, and get everyday people involved in preserving these important pieces of history. After a decade of traveling the country and working to save endangered buildings, she’s poured her experiences with navigating the preservation landscape into an accessible format so that more people can join the effort.###

A YEAR FOR THE BOOKS: AUTHOR PORTRAYS LIFE DURING THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF 1969National (June 24, 2025) Janet Sarjeant dives into the division between historical events and personal life in her new book, 1969: Half Year, Half Light. Published by Warren Publishing, the novel follows a teenager’s senior year of high school in small-town America during the tumultuous year of 1969. Sarjeant draws on different recollections of the time to craft a nostalgic story that explores the experience of watching once-in-a-lifetime moments capture the nation’s consciousness on television while living in a tiny town distant from the center of attention.Sarjeant strives to imbue her characters with the same, singular mix of emotions she once felt as a teenager on the cusp of adulthood, explaining that 1969 was full of “tragic times as well as joyous times, because there are poignant times in every life.” Shared experiences connect readers to her writing. “We were a bit isolated, even though TV brought the world into our homes, but everyone knows where they were when the first man landed on the moon,” says Sarjeant.Readers are propelled into the life of Edna Louise Walters, or “Eddy” for short, as she navigates the journey into adulthood during a time of change for the world. She feels the charge in the air, she feels electric with anticipation for the things to come, and she grapples with desires she can’t even name. Like any teenager, Eddy is keenly aware of the in-between state she is in, and the challenges that can pose.As Eddy maneuvers through her 18th birthday, her final year of high school, and the countless historical events that dominate the news, she finds herself falling for a boy who’s also struggling to bridge the gap between childhood and adulthood. Serjeant puts small-town problems in conversation with national dialogues, grounded by her lyrical storytelling.Readers will undoubtedly recognize the monumental events spread throughout the story, either through personal experience or familiarity with the media frenzy around them that has continued to circulate decades later. 1969: Half Year, Half Light presents readers with a chance to reconnect with history through a personal lens and re-experience the anticipation of what life on the cusp of adulthood felt like.###

• Suburban Living Magazine - Click to View Online Publication

The Great Backyard Bird CountEvery February since 1998, participants around the world record bird sightings from their backyard over a four-day period, providing conservationists and scientists with invaluable insight into species trends. This event, called the Great Backyard Bird Count, tracks bird populations across the United States and beyond. A few members of local birding group Wake Audubon were kind enough to speak with me about this impressive citizen science effort.“The Great Backyard Bird Count meets you where you are,” Wake Audubon Communications Chair Megan Damico tells me. “You can tally on eBird, you can use Merlin, you can use the Audubon app, and all of that data congregates together to support science.” Indeed, out of the many counts that Wake Audubon members participate in throughout the year, this is probably the most accessible of them all. It’s in the name: the focus on backyard birds means travel is completely optional in order to get involved, and because residential areas that aren’t usually covered during other counts, the data that is gathered fills an important niche! Participants can choose to count for as little as fifteen minutes or as long as you want, making this count especially flexible for those with busy schedules. It’s simple, and anyone who uploads at least one bird sighting during the event’s timeframe can proudly say that they contributed to science.The Great Backyard Bird Count isn’t just accessible in those ways, either. The count, which is organized by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology partnered with the National Audubon Society, was the very first to publish data online in nearly real-time, meaning anyone interested can view the survey data as it’s uploaded. This immediate display of the impact individuals are creating puts the entire effort into perspective. The scale of data collection possible with such an accessible approach is achievable thanks to the efforts of the local communities who band together for this event like Wake Audubon. Speaking of scale—last year, this count received reported sightings of more than two-thirds of all known bird species worldwide, a staggering figure.Brian O’Shea, a compiler for the Christmas Bird Count, offered his perspective on the Great Backyard Bird Count as well.“There’s a variety of motivations for people participating,” he says. “Sometimes, birders want to find other birders. Sometimes, people are new to the area and just want to meet people. Sometimes, it’s a family tradition.” He sees plenty of first-timers every year when he organizes a group for the Christmas count, and he makes sure to connect them with experienced members who can guide them through counting. The important thing, he made sure to tell me, is to “count what you can.” Nobody is perfect at identification, and doing your best is what matters.John Conners, a long-time participant in bird counts and an active Wake Audubon volunteer, has lots of stories about counting birds, especially where population trends are concerned. He recalled the impact of landfills that opened in the 1970s and 80s within the area where his group would go to count birds, which happened to be close to lakes that were the perfect habitat for certain species.“We had these flocks of gulls, particularly ring-billed gulls, which breed in the Great Lakes and migrate down the river systems, eventually making their way eastward to the coast,” he explains. “Well, once the landfills opened, there was a smorgasbord of food just waiting for these birds. Every day they would fly out and feed, and then spend the night at nearby lakes. Suddenly, they weren’t making it all the way to the coast anymore!” For years, his group counted tens of thousands of gulls. Once the landfills disappeared, closing sometime in the 1990s, the gulls disappeared too. “It doesn’t mean the gull population has decreased, it just means that they’re not using our area the way they used to,” he clarifies. He says it was fascinating to watch them come and go, and since then he’s never seen anywhere close to the number of gulls he was sighting during the period where the landfills were active. This is precisely the kind of insight that bird counts are able to provide by collecting data year after year.He’s also observed the rise and fall of other species over the years, like the population boom of waterfowl from feeding on an invasive and fast-growing aquatic weed called hydrilla. Local agencies began to combat the overgrown vegetation by stocking grass carp in the lakes, which ate just about anything edible, not just hydrilla, and the waterfowl population crashed. Efforts to control the weed in waterways continue today, and Conners notes that the population of waterfowl in the area never fully recovered. Again, he points out that this doesn’t mean ducks disappeared nationally—we know they didn’t, thanks to the annual counts—but some species haven’t been so lucky, like those that favor farmland and have seen a widespread decline due to urbanization and certain agricultural practices.In addition to counts, Wake Audubon also organizes projects to address species decline. Members remove invasive species, plant native ones, and pick up litter, among other efforts. Conners led a habitat improvement walk for American woodcocks in early December, working to maintain courtship plots for the species, and this February the participants from that event as well as anyone else interested will revisit the area to observe the happy woodcock couples. Conners emphasizes that witnessing the way the birds respond to the volunteer work is incredibly rewarding, calling it “the next level of commitment to the environment.”For those looking to pick up birding, Conners says feeder-watching, like the backyard count encourages, is a gateway to involvement. He and Damico agree that it’s also the beginning of involvement with nature as a whole.“There’s no better organism on the planet Earth for getting people involved in nature than birds,” Conners insists. “Birding is the door that opens people to the natural world.”“It’s a way to be out in nature,” Damico concurs. “It’s meditative, and it’s movement. It demands your focus instead of your phone.”
Conners says he’s always looking for things that make him feel optimistic, and birds often provide that. For him, birdwatching can be a way to measure the continuing seasons, like a ritual that reminds him the world is doing OK.“I remember seeing my first white-throated sparrow last fall. It’s the same bird from the spring, and it’s already anticipating me feeding it! I know it’s the exact same bird, because we band them. It will fly a thousand miles and then it will come back to my yard again, because it had a successful year here last year.” I can hear the wonder in his voice as he remembers his feathered visitor. “You mark these things, and it gives you peace of mind,” he continues. “If you don’t know what a white-throated sparrow is, you can’t celebrate it! But once you start learning who they are, you can’t help but feel more connected to the world.”In addition to the Great Backyard Bird Count, Wake Audubon has a beginner birding program that holds workshops for visual identification, birding by ear, and many other tricks of the trade. Wake Audubon serves Wake County and neighboring areas, including Johnston, Franklin, and Nash Counties. Learn more about them at wakeaudubon.org. Carolina Bird Club is another resource recommended by the birders interviewed in this article, and this organization not only serves as a central source of information for annual bird count events but also hosts meetings and field trips. The birding apps mentioned in this article are eBird, Merlin Bird ID, and Audubon Bird Guide, and they can all be downloaded for free from your phone’s app store. Now go mark your calendar for February 13-16 and join in the Great Backyard Bird Count! For more information, visit birdcount.org.