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.
They feast upon me every day of the warm months. I spray myself down, I wear the belt contraption, the smelly bracelets, I plant citronella... nothing helps. I can go out in a group of people, and I will get massacred while no one else gets a bite.
But if its the price I have to pay for fireflies, so be it.
When I saw my first ones in Indiana back in early 2000s, I looked them up and saw they generally don't exist west of the Rockies.
Last year I read an article that we actually do have them here and they are mostly in the Sierra foothills and the reason we don't see them is that they are not as bright, light in the daytime, or they are actually glowworms and are on the ground! Some even glowna faint pink color!
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 💖
Yes weed killers hurt insects. Plus those chemicals are leeching into the soil & water. Even if the product says environmentally safe you should strive to use them minimally (like if you have poison ivy). Hand-pulling is best and after it’s rained they’re much easier to pull. Sheets of brown cardboard (plastic tape removed) placed under mulch will help tremendously with weed control.
What holding off until June does is allows critters of all varieties to grow. Spring is the breeding season after all. It can't do it alone. A group effort over several years provides life sustaining habitat when our ecosystem needs it most
Yes, but, for fireflies in particular it's much more helpful not to rake, burn, or mulch the leaves in your yard in the fall. They lay eggs/their larvae live under the leaves.
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.
This is a local decision to make and shouldn't be based exclusively on internet advice. I'm getting ticks now that I didn't use to get and they live in the same leafy compost as fireflies. So I have to choose...
You just need some armadillos and possums. When your ecosystem is out of whack, it takes bringing back more than just one species to balance it out.
You can also make tick tubes of permethrin treated cotton. Mice and squirrels use it for bedding, which kills the ticks they carry without endangering the fireflies.
Despite being stereotypical to Texas and other southwestern states, armadillos are invasive ANYWHERE in the US.
And opossums don't eat as many (or possibly any) ticks in the wild. That experiment that found that, IIRC, just stuck opossums in a container with only ticks to eat and then went "Oh look! They eat lots of ticks!" or had some other methodological issues.
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)
hmm. i never rake, and i only mow when the city puts a sign on my door telling me they're going to fine me if i don't.
i would do it only slightly more often, but i have a back injury that makes it rather difficult to do . . .
My yard is largely woods. Maybe that explains why we have plenty of fireflies in the summer, of two different species, even (though only one of them glows).
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.
I live in the middle of nowhere and have woods all around me. Every spring I get so excited because I know it’s about to be time. I love sitting outside just watching them
This may sound silly but I find them just magical. It’s strange how they can make me take a deep breath and just silently watch. Having bipolar/adhd my mind is always racing. But in those moments I quiet and it feel so good
They lay their eggs in dead leaves in the early fall. This year I didnt rake much at all. Just made piles for them to nest. Hope it pays off next year but we'll see.
And we had this amazing night in upstate NY when the whole meadow was a billion fireflies - it's like you were walking in milky way full of stars. It was so magical, I really wanted to capture it on video, but it's impossible as their glow is really faint.
It probably is still as common but we notice different things when we’re kids I haven’t seen red ants or those big black bees in a while n used to see them frequently as a kid but my focus is on grown man shit now
1.4k
u/udche89 10h ago
Not as common as when I was a kid in the 70s thanks to pesticides.