A big joy of my youth was watching the fireflies (or lightning bugs as we
called them) on warm summer evenings. The backyard would be filled
with them. Their slowly pulsating lights seemed to add to that lazy
summer feeling that hung in the dreamy, lillac scented air. They were as
much a part of my summers as homemade ice cream, watermellon seed
spitting contests, and static charged baseball games crackling on my
pocket transistor radio.
But, sadly, i’ve noticed that there seem to be fewer flashing lights in the
backyard than i remember from years before. I wasn’t sure if this was
because of some heightened romantic memories of days gone by that
don’t quite reflect the reality of that era, or if the planet was actually
becoming darker because of the firefly’s gradual disappearance. Today i
came across this article that sheds some light on the subject:
It’s a sad state of affairs, for sure, but I thought you were going to write about the diminishing amount of sunlight now reaching the earth, its effect on plants and living things in general, and how it ties in with global warming. http://www.naturalnews.com/003747.html
The very first time I met my daughter-in-law she was visiting us (here in Chicago) from her home in Colorado. She’d grown up in equally dry New Mexico.
One late summer evening at dusk we were all walking home from the frozen custard store when she stopped in her tracks, startled,
and asked “What’s THAT?!!!”
"What’s what? I asked not knowing where to look.
The same questions went back and forth until she found it in herself to describe what she was seeing.
She’d read about fireflies but had never seen one in real life. Until visiting Chicago in August she’d never been anywhere humid enough to support the environment they needed to survive.
She was pretty relieved to hear that it was bugs she was seeing, that she wasn’t having hallucinations from the frozen custard we’d been eating as we walked.
I’ve noticed the same thing this year. Mainly because my granddaughter and I have had very few to chase around the yard in the late evening.
They use to be everywhere here during the summer nights.
I saw fireflies (we called them lightning bugs, too) in Illinois when I was a very young child. My husband and kids were lifelong Alaskans who had never seen fireflies until a visit to Virginia several years ago. It was really fun for all of us – the one GOOD thing about that miserably humid climate!
Sadly, there are no fireflies west of the Rockies. When we lived in North Carolina, we used to look forward every year to what we called “magic night.” Usually it would be preceded by a few nights of random sightings…often so quickly gone that we’d say “was that a…”.
Then, suddenly, one night in late spring, we’d be sitting on the back porch when all of a sudden sparks would start rising up from the garden. Within minutes, you’d swear the garden was on fire, as more and more fireflies swirled up from the grass. Within an hour, they would have reached the tree tops, and our big hickories would look as if they were decked out with Christmas lights.
The fireflies would be around all summer, of course, but there would only be one “magic night” each year. That made it all the more special.
Did any of you who lived in firefly regions ever see people taking the glowing part off the insect and pretending it was a diamond of a ring on their finger?
I recall when I was very young some of the older kids in my neighborhood took me to tears with that
and what more, they knew I’d get all worked up over a “silly bug” being sacrificed which seemed to make it all the more sweet for them.
I saw a firefly for the first time in Wiltshire earlier this year. It wasn’t flying about, it was just in the long grass by the side of the path. I tried to look for it, thinking it was someone’s mobile phone that was dropped, but mobile phones don’t crawl away. (well, they do, but not so obviously.)
Scientists haven’t got to grips with the change of populations yet. A few years ago the dormouse population crashed. And the sparrow population crashed. But these creatures are regaining lost ground. Statistically, it’s not unusual. It’s still worth investigating, and encouraging the critters, though.
It’s funny, because I have always read that fireflies are not native to California, yet my father, aged 78, swears that he saw them here when he was a kid.
Species decimation and accidental regeneration are weird fact of modern life. I wouldn’t count those fireflies out yet. Sometimes, even in urban settings, circumstances are created that allow a species to thrive, even in a semi-artificial settting.
There is a movement afloat around here to darken the night environment, both to save energy and bring back some semblance of natural contrast. SF tried shutting down many lights this summer on a few announced days. Because of the efforts of greens to restore wetlands, there is a possibility of some species re-generating. A celebrated family of beavers has moved into the downtown area of my hometown (Martinez, CA) much to the interest of local media and gawkers. I think there is also a rise in the river otter population as more creeks are uncovered, after having been put into underground culverts for almost a hundred years.
The worst part about bringing back the old California, in terms of wetlands, would be the natural population increases of mosquitoes, which were legendary in the swampy Central Valley before so many levees and reclamation dried much of it out.
I saw fireflies for the first time when I visited my brother in Tennessee, about 30 miles south of Nashville. Between the croaking of the frogs, the racket made by the insects and the visuals of the fireflies, a summer evening was pretty intense! Much noisier than the semi-desert Calaforny, that’s for sure. We get a cricket or two…
Usually the ones that are on the ground are the females. They crawl around in the grass flashing their lights in a certain pattern, and the males fly around flashing theirs in another. When a flying male spots a female whose light pattern he admires…well, I’m sure you can take it from there!
