Fireflies: The Twinkle in Nature's Eye

Image Gallery A firefly-studded meadow in New Jersey. E.R. DEGGINGER/COLOR PIC INC.

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It was back in the days when my old friend Hugh was a new friend. We'd just finished dinner at his cabin in North Carolina's Saluda Mountains. "Let's go for a walk," he said, "I have something to show you." Noting a suspicious glint in his eyes, I asked him what was up. "You'll see," he said. "Here, take a flashlight. It'll be dark by the time we get back."

So we filed outside, Hugh in the lead and my wife, Laurel, and I following and exchanging "now-what?" glances. He led us onto an old logging road that plunged deep into the early-summer woods. The darkening forest was hushed, save for occasional twilight birdsong. All around were tangles of rhododendron and wizened old oaks towering above bracken fern. It was the sort of woodland where, at any turn, you would half expect to see an impish elf. But the magic we were about to witness far surpassed any mere fantasy.

"Here," Hugh declared, stopping as we came into a small clearing.

"Where?" I asked, looking round.

"Just wait," Hugh said, mysterious as ever. "Just wait."

And so there we stood, waiting, as dusk gradually turned to night.

"Hey, look — lightning bugs," Laurel remarked, pointing into the distance.

"Uh huh," Hugh said.

"Wow, they're everywhere," I said, now noticing hundreds, no thousands, of tiny lights rising from the ground in every possible direction.

"Uh huh," Hugh said.

"I don't believe it," Laurel whispered. "They're not flashing. They're just ... on all the time."

"I told you I had something to show you," Hugh said.

All around us now in the blackness, suspended at our feet and far off into the dark woods, never more than 10 inches above the forest floor, was a bejeweled, undulating carpet of countless steadily glowing, slowly drifting fireflies. Together the wee lights seemed to mirror the terrain, dipping where there were gullies, rising with hills, each floating spark moving in slow motion, some circling in restless eddies, some gliding on a steady path. It was as though we giants had somehow come upon a shifting sea of light and were standing calf-deep among the rolling, glittering waves. Slowly, isolated groups of the fireflies rose 4 or 5 feet and commenced flashing — clouds of living stars twinkling above a luminous ocean.

I cannot tell you in biological terms what we witnessed that night. I've neither seen nor heard of anything like it since. The entomologists I've asked seem puzzled, especially by the fireflies" steady glow and by their sheer numbers. Perhaps we happened to be in the right place at the right time to see a rare large hatch, a massive emergence of glowing pupae in their first moments of firefly adulthood.

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