It’s the little things I remember about growing up in Kentucky that I most enjoy upon returning. The blooming carpets of multicolored wildflowers in the fields, the forested areas rich with diverse types of trees, the common sightings of wildlife, the nightly singing and croaks of the crickets and frogs, but it is the evening flights of the lightning bugs during their Spring mating ritual that I relish the most.
The end of May through the first week or two in June is the time of their peak performance. The throngs of participants rise from the grasslands as dusk falls each evening. Their tails blinking slowly with a soft and soothing green light. Their seemingly clumsy and slightly erratic flight path that leads them into the heights of the leaves and branches of a nearby tree. During the peak of this annual ritualistic event, the tall trees light up like massive Christmas trees, decorated from head to toe with hundreds of tiny flashing green lamps. A scene I find totally amazing and satisfying to behold.
It becomes more difficult each year for these tiny creatures to locate suitable areas for their mating tasks as the lighting from our homes and businesses are slowly diminishing the darkness needed for their purposes. I doubt that many people who live in well lit areas have ever even seen masses of lightning bugs to this extent, let alone realize how their lives have impacted this extraordinary display of nature’s wonders.
More often than not we thrive at the expense of the natural world and never weigh out the consequences. How simple it would be to just limit our sometimes overwhelming use of exterior lighting to allow nature more space, space we encroached from nature more likely than not as a means to safeguard our possessions.
I used to live in a small rental house in E’town tucked in an alley behind the backyards of a string of larger houses. It was an old neighborhood with stately trees abound and a large park-like area across the alley and running all the way down to where the alley met the next cross street. I used to take walks down the alley at night around this time of year just to mingle with the lightning bugs as they rose so quietly into those trees.
Late at night I discovered was the best time for viewing. None of the surrounding house lights or street lamps penetrated the thick mass of spring leaves. It was dark and quiet, but yet alive with the twinkling of lightning bugs both as they took flight from the ground and those already alight and settled into the trees. It’s something that one has to experience in person, no attempt on my part to capture this wonder on film was ever successful.
I lived in that house for several years. Directly across the alley from my house was a large church parking lot, and it butting all the way up to the mostly untouched park area where the lightning bugs thrived. One year the church decided to install large high powered security lights aimed across the parking lot and into the wooded park light area. The placement of these lights allowed for extensive intrusion of the intense white light into the once dark forested area. That year I noticed a significant drop in the number of lightning bugs where they had previously flourished and they now gathered further down the alley where there was still enough darkness for their needs.
That was the last of the beautiful Spring light shows I had come to expect each year. I can still remember how it used to be, like walking through a tunnel, a canopy formed by the bowing branches of the older trees and the entire landscape lit impeccably by these seemingly insignificant creatures.
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