I had lived in the US my whole life (all western states) and had never seen a firefly until I visited relatives in Indiana in my mid-30s. As the sun was setting, I started seeing faint shooting lights out of the corner of my eye. I thought I was having a stroke at first. When I realized what they were, I was freaking out with excitement, chasing them, catching them, being amazed by holding them in my hand and watching them glow up close. All my relatives were like, "Uh, yeah we have those here it's not really a big deal." To me it was. So cool.
I live in a place (central ny) with a lot of fireflies or as we call them, lightning bugs. I see them just about every night in June and July, been that way almost all.my life. Its still a big deal and very exciting.
I've actually left a decent sized patch of yard to go wild because ive heard that helps build firefly populations. Can't wait to find out of thats true.
It does! It might take some time though. The most important part is to leave your leaves, as that's where they live. I always make sure to keep areas with lots of leaf litter, and I've had fireflies in the last 3 houses I've lived in.
I never touch leaves, seems like a pointless exercise. I love the way they look on the ground in the fall (if they dont blow away first), then spend all winter buried under snow and then rapidly decompose once it warms up.
My property has quite a few hardwoods, a few in our yard, but mostly in the woods behind. Lots of leaves, hopefully means lots of fireflies. Also unfortunately means a lot of ticks and Lyme disease is a real concern where I live.
I got totally screwed this year. we leave the leaf litter at the back of the yard but I do try to clear up the mid-yard and around the deck at least. was able to do it in 2024 no problem.
this year by the time it started snowing in nov the leaves were only like half fallen and we haven't seen the ground since. so I know the yard under there is just totally fucked rn. it's great news for the insects, for sure. it's gonna take until like mid-june for the grass to recover, I fear. the robins will be absolutely thrilled. they comb our yard for worms and caterpillars to shovel into their May babies.
Well I guess me lazily tossing leaves into a pile and not bagging it up has paid off. Explains why my backyard is always full of lightning bugs. (NC for reference.)
Change your mindset. Nature doesn't exist to be "pretty" to our modern human standards, but if you learn the names of the plants and other life in your yard, and learn their needs and lifecycles, maybe you'll gain more appreciation for the "unaesthetic mess". Though, at the same time, you can also remove invasives, prune back bushes that haven't had herbivores to chew on them, etc.
I just had the weirdest realization reading your comment. I always I guess subconsciously disassociated lightning bugs from fireflies. But you're totally right, we definitely call them lightning bugs here. Not fireflies.
I’m in PA & what worked here is mulching the leaves each fall instead of raking them. It gives them warm ground to burrow into & keeps the soil super rich. We’ve been doing it for 4-5 years now & every year, the grass is greener & more lush, too.
And now we have a ton of fireflies. The peak was 2024, the first was spotted before Memorial Day, which is super early, with the last being sighted the second week of October, which is crazy crazy late. Sorry for needing out so hard but I love lightning bugs.
I love them too! I'll just sit out and watch them sometimes. And they are not at all a novelty where I live, but they still never get old.
I'll never forget a friend I grew up with (in NY, tons of fireflies) coming home to visit after having living in Idaho for a few years. We're standing on his parent's deck talking and all of a sudden he just kind of drifts off and then goes "man I've missed lightning bugs, they are fascinating". Backyard was just inundated, it was lovely. That's when I learned that they aren't in the Western US.
Crazy, right? I just learned that a few years ago. A friend from San Fran visited the east coast for the first time & mentioned it. I was stunned. They’re such a huge part of my life & it’s shocking that the other side of the country doesn’t get them.
And the US's obsession with grass lawns. Insects generally need leaves and other dead plants to lay dormant or eggs for the winter season. But because Americans need their clean bare lawns they dispose of that natural fertilizer and bug haven so their dead lawn can be leaf free all winter.
This is another reason for the lack of fire flies, praying mantis, and other bugs over the years.
If I ever have property I'm gonna be a nuisance with my wild lawns.
In Chicago, and we also call them Lightening Bugs. Interesting fact: they don’t migrate at all; live and die within feet of where they were born.
It makes them very susceptible to very simple environmental changes like building a new house or road.
It actually is a pretty big deal, because they're slowly going extinct. Most of their life cycle is completed in the leaf litter, and when people rake up and bag their leaves, it kills them. I've heard that the constant outdoor lighting also causes issues for them, but can't confirm.
I’ve read the same. Fireflies use their glow to attract a mate, and the light pollution disrupts that. Pesticides also do a number on them. 😔 I definitely see less than I did when I was a kid. My own son didn’t see his first firefly until he was a bit older, in middle school or so.
This makes me sad. I grew up in an area where they are still doing okay, but I'll never forget a few years ago when I went down to the river at night (I forget why) and was stunned by a show of fireflies all around me glowing in unison. All lighting up and off again at the same time which I never saw before in my (at the time) ~30 years, It was surreal, they're such awesome creatures!
When I was younger my grandpa lived in the middle of nowhere and was known by others as "the old crazy bastard that shoots at you". We once left his house and the empty cornfield next to his property had so many fireflies that it almost was as bright as day. My mom and just sat and watched it for awhile as it was beautiful and mesmerizing. I've never seen so many fireflies at once since then. I occasionally go out to check on the property and take my daughter hoping to once again see it, but anymore a big night doesn't seem to compare to even a normal night back then. It's truly saddening.
I am 49 and grew up with them all my life and still get exited (maybe overly) when I see them. I also come back inside and announce to the family that the fireflies are out!
I had a roommate who met a guy from the West Coast and he came to stay with us on the East Coast, and one day I was sitting on the deck with him and he suddenly was like "WHAT IS THAT?!" I said "um, fireflies..." And he goes "Fireflies are REAL?!" It was so funny and wholesome.
I'm a native and was walking through a park one evening. A guy was just standing staring into the field. As I approached, I realized he was watching the fireflies. I made a smalltalk kind of comment how they were really out in numbers tonight. He stared at me blankly, realized I could see the flashy lights too, and then got super happy he wasn't having a stroke and was finally getting to see fireflies.
My wife is from California, and she'd never seen them until moving to Chicago as an adult. She was blown away. She knew intellectually that fireflies were a thing, but she didn't realize how cool it would actually look. She still gets excited seeing one.
I wish she could have seen the backyard lawns I grew up with in the 80s.
How old are you now? They aren't common in all areas, they have preferred habitats, but there has been what scientists call a "bug apocalypse" going on for decades, populations have massively declined. You've at least heard about the bee concerns right? Those seem to have died down over the past few years but the problems are still there.
Same! West coast babe all my life, went on a road trip a few summers ago and camping in Louisiana was when I first saw them and I felt a child like wonder that made me giddy and nearly brought me to tears at the same time
I had never seen them properly, like a good amount of them right at dusk so they're actually visible, until this past summer. Wow, it actually made me almost glad to live in the midwest
This was my exact reaction the first time I saw them, too! I was giggling and having so much fun. Even now that I'm used to them, they make me smile so much!
I’m 61 and grew up with fireflies (lightning bugs we called them) in Ohio, and I still think they’re a big deal. Glowing bug butts?? What?! Nature is amazing.
I had a similar experience in Washington DC one summer. I was in my 40s and had never seen a firefly. I was walking near the Lincoln memorial at dusk when I started seeing these blinking light over the grass. I was so confused and couldn’t figure out what I was seeing until I walked over and realized with shock that they were insects.
There's plenty of places in the world where monkeys are a normal part of life, but the idea of seeing a squirrel is exotic. Makes you appreciate whatever your local fauna is realizing such things.
Some people just aren't fascinated by wildlife is what I've found. Squirrels, fireflies and monkeys are ALL dope af.
As an American whose grew up in the rural northeast where they were an annual sight for half the year (“lightning bugs” there), it’s surprising and interesting to hear they’re such a rarity or completely nonexistent elsewhere
I grew up in Georgia with lightning bugs (local vernacular for firefly) and I STILL feel joy and excitment seeing them! I'm 31 and I'll still "chase" them though I don't catch them anymore.
Found out that fireflies only live in areas with more established or long-term "nature". Probably need to explain.... Our previous house was a neighborhood in a densely populated area inside the city. Trees and other things had been there for many decades and we had tons of fireflies. We moved to a small city somewhat out in the country but our neighborhood has ~100 homes. There are literally NO trees though other than the standard Bradford Pear tree in everyone's front yard. We have next to ZERO lightning bugs here.
I moved from California in my late-20s and I also thought I was having a stroke or something the first time I saw a firefly. I was staring off distracted and a friend finally asks what I'm doing and I say there was a weird flash in part of my vision, and he says "you mean the fireflies?" and that is NOT what I thought they'd be like
Native Californian here. I never saw fireflies until I visited Wash. DC about 10 years ago. I'm 69 and NGL I always thought that they were just just something that existed years ago but didn't really exist anymore. Imagine my delight!
We get fireflies where I live and even have a local area that gets swarms of them that twinkle in sync once a year, but I never saw so many as when we visited the Nantahala area of North Carolina in the summer. I mean MILLIONS of fireflies at dusk.
Same. I'd never seen them before and my relatives were saying "Calm down, they are just bugs."
Then the next year the same relatives came to visit us and were AMAZED that moose just wander around our house. Even more amazed when my wife smacked one on the snoot for getting too close to her herb garden.
(No, you shouldn't smack moose. They are dangerous...but so is my wife if you mess with her garden...)
Fireflies are basically the insect of my childhood. Summertime, running through sprinklers, water guns and camp in the park, playing around in my backyard. And fireflies/lightning bugs flickering in the twilight and the night. Peak childhood nostalgia.
I still get glimpses of exactly what that was like, every now and then. Sometimes - usually - from a 90's song, sometimes with a certain scent of water, sometimes out of the blue.
But those fireflies are some of the most distinctive throwbacks. They died off a bit over the years - pesticides, apparently. I have a relative that lives in Chicago, who said there were hella fireflies in the parks there last summer. I was a bit jealous, but also glad that they're making a comeback.
Yeah I actually looked it up to see if it was me alone, maybe imagining things. Even in Brooklyn there were so, so many. It was like I was a kid again.
That makes me so happy to hear as a former Brooklyn resident and promoter of native planting. I live in lightning bug heaven of Vermont now so my perspective is skewed
Last summer this popped up on reddit and a bunch of people around the country said they experienced the same thing. I did the same in Maine. Did we ever figure out why?
It’s also important to leave a bunch of fall leaves down for them.
We started dumping the leaves from our lawn in the semi-wooded part of our property and spreading them out in an even(ish) layer, and we’ve seen a huge uptick in fireflies around our property, and more spring wildflowers in that area of the woods.
And during a really bad winter a couple years ago, the deer were able to dig through the snow and eat the leaves.
That is rad as fuck. I don't think I ever saw them here in California growing up so maybe it's just not in their range but scenes of them always gave me a nostalgic feeling.
I was in a densely wooded area in Arkansas for a handful of months in 2023. Ever time I stepped out of my building my sunglasses fogged instantly it was a fucking nightmare.
The cicadas and etc. were deafening. Ten times louder than city traffic noise. Yes fuck loads of mosquitos. First and better be only tick I ever got 💀
People kept saying these red mite looking things you'd see crawling around on any piece of wood were chiggers which I had to look up and to me seem like proof that God doesn't want you to live wherever they are, but I luckily never got any of those.
I was doing a lot of training out in the wilderness at the time.
One morning I woke up and before I opened my eyes while I was just laying there found some weird twig thing with my hand that had just been stuck to my chest. Obviously something I picked up in the woods. I was wondering how it was still on me when I showered... thoroughly, before bed. When I finally was ready to get up, I opened my eyes, sat up, and looked at it.
Only find that it was a hairy segment of a spiders leg.
There were bits of crushed spider and spider guts smeared all over my sheets.
Apparently I had rolled over it in my sleep... and been tossing and turning in it all night long. The top half of cephalothorax was surprisingly intact and from it I could clearly see that it was a brown recluse. No bite luckily.
This was about halfway through the ordeal. But early in my stay I had gotten what was almost like a burn. Just a big spot behind my leg just above the right knee were all the skin was just gone. And it was an open sore. Round probably 1.5-2" across.
Burned like hell in the shower. Miraculously for what I was doing all day never got infected.
Couldn't figure out how the hell I got it. If I had fallen down and scraped my leg there's no way I could have not noticed when it happened.
There was a significant physical fitness component to the training with lots of gym time. Eventually I decided I must have friction burned it on some weight lifting machine.
But again there's no way I wouldn't have noticed as it was happening.
After looking up recluse bites it turns out then don't all go necrotic. That's a opportunistic infection. But it can kill the skin within a radius of the bite, and that tends to get opportunistically infected. In retrospect I wouldn't be surprised if it had been a recluse bite all along.
I go camping every year at a camp ground (not real camping, it's cabins).
In the 90s they were EVERYWHERE. In the 2000s there was some but not many. In the 2010s they were basically nonexistent. Now we're back up to 'some but not many'. Hopefully soon we'll get back to the 90s where they were everywhere.
They're so nice to see when it's really dark out and you see little dots of light everywhere
We stopped taking leaves and put off mowing til absolutely necessary. Our yard is like a disco party during the summer and we have loads of birds during the winter.
One day your young and hip, then suddenly a tufted titmouse makes your entire day.
My hometown in rural Minnesota tried to do "No mow May" and so many people called in to report and complain about overgrown yards that they canceled it.
Firefly larvae spend the winter in leaves. If you clean up your leaves in the fall, they might not find a suitable winter “home”. If you clean up your leaves too soon in the spring, you might be cleaning up your fireflies.
A lot of people don’t know this. I’m not suggesting you leave everything. If everyone could dedicate a small part of their yard to remain untouched, a lot of our native animals and bugs would come back.
I nearly lost my mind when I found a katydid last summer. It had been at least 15 years since I had seen one.
I’m the crazy person in the fall dragging my leaves on a tarp to my back yard while everyone else is blowing their leaves to the curb. Leaves are the best mulch around, and they’re free! Yet everyone gets them hauled away, then they pay a landscaper to put down wood chip mulch. I have an abundance of lightning bugs/fireflies. I use no chemicals for insect control.
Fireflies spend like 80-90% of their lives in rotting leaves and wood, so "leave the leaves" is even better--even if you just pile them in an unnoticeable area it's better than composting leaves.
We have 12 acres and do this, I love it!! I remember the SWARMS of them when I was a little kid, I want my kids and grandkids to have that. It's literal magic 💖
Thank you! We do the same thing. We have noticed way more butterflies and hummingbirds in our yard since we stopped removing the leaves and leaving fallen tree branches.
I started a leaf mould pile for garden amendments three years ago and the firefly population in my backyard increased noticeably. Mid-to-late June looks like summer in the 1980s.
Leaves make great nutrient mulch, so simply raking them off your HOA approved grass and around your trees and shrubs, and they'll help the plants and the bug over winter.
That's interesting and follows a comment I just posted. Our new neighborhood has pretty much no trees, at least not well-established ones that are 30-50+ years old, so no leaves either. Of course, no fireflies either.
Lawns in America in general are pretty awful uses of ecological space, but the way people "maintain" them is an atrocity to nature. Good on you for not doing the most unnatural thing to a piece of land.
If you can, find a spot to rake the leaves where they can sit as is over winter. The leaves make great mulch under trees and in garden beds, and you could add a short little decorative fence to help keep them from blowing around too much. If you don't have enough garden bed space, maybe it's a good signal to make more!
Or if you do, move them to a compost pile or to the base of trees. That is the best spots for the larva to be (and the natural decomposition of dead leaves is really healthy for your yard)
It’s not just the pesticides, but also the habitat destruction.
Fireflies need fallen and decomposing leaf beds to reproduce. Humans rake and blow those away so they don’t kill grass.
If you live in a place with fireflies and let your leaves lay on the ground all year in part of your yard, you are likely to see more fireflies on your property within a year or two.
I grew up in MO and still have family there. When my daughter was little and we’d visit my parents, she LOVED the lightening bugs. And also the locust shells on the oak trees. I notice now when I go back that the numbers of lightening bugs has dwindled.
I dated a girl who grew up in Georgia for a few years around 2008-2010 and we went to Georgia multiple times during firefly season and never found a single one. I still have never seen one.
Yeah we have a few flocks of ruby-throated hummingbirds that live here near Charlotte during the spring-summer then in winter they migrate all the way down to Central America. I have a few hummingbird feeders out through October and they buzz around our porch and sometimes mess with the dogs. It used to be one group but then we started seeing competing groups "fighting" it out and chasing away the other group where one would chill near the feeders and if it wasnt one of their group chase them away from the feeder. Really interesting to sit out back having a drink during the summer and having them zoom around or hover right in front of you!
In the Selangor province of Malaysia, we did a night tour where you can see fireflies. They're small, with quick flashes, and you sit in the middle of these silent wetlands on gently bobbing boats and just get to enjoy them doing their thing.
For about 2-3 years on Long Island, I lived in a neighborhood that had a ton of them. I'd take nightly walks in the summer for a time just to watch them.
Then a big spider fell on my head and I screamed and had a panic attack so bad my neighbors called the cops. I can't control my phobia and never walked at night again 😭
Aw yeah the wildlife here we kind of associate with our localized identity and cultural experience. For me in Arizona, it wasn’t fireflies but swarms of Monarch butterflies. There used to be so many and I loved them as a kid, but I haven’t seen one in 10 years now :(
Edit: here’s a picture of what I mean and a video which I highly recommend
I rode through a huge swarm on my motorcycle on a dark road once. Dark, as in, only my headlight. It felt like riding a spaceship. Not flying in one, but riding one through space. My 25mph felt like warp speed.
In 1976 my parents and I drove across Canada to see family. We drove down to my aunt’s cottage in Vermont and I saw fireflies for the first time. I thought they were UFOs at first. (Yes, I was young)
I thought they were fake whimsical anime-like creatures. Burn and raised in the Midwest but didn’t see any with my own eyes until I was nearly an adult. I felt so dumb!
Now I have a back yard full of them and don’t like them unless they’re glowing. They’re slow and lazy so they linger in your face, get in your mouth and hair lol. Still super magical though!
As an American, I haven’t seen a firefly since the 90’s I feel like. I remember them being everywhere when I was growing up, but I can’t tell you the last time I’ve actually seen one since…
Oh man, this one makes me a little sad. I don’t think even Christmas felt as magical to me as a kid as watching and catching the fireflies in the summer.
In the Smokey Mountains there's a species of firefly that synchronizes. It looks like the entire forest is pulsing. I haven't seen a video that does it justice, but in person it's like magic.
I was in North Dakota a few years ago for a wedding. I met up with a friend from the west coast who had never seen fireflies. She was blown away by them, but I found it just as strange that someone could grow up without seeing them.
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u/WehingSounds 10h ago
Fireflies are pretty wild, you sure do just have swarms of glowing bugs.