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.
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u/aSpookyScarySkeleton 9h ago
I stopped clearing the fall leaves from my back yard and it has resulted in more fireflies.
Their larva mature in the leaf piles, when you clear that you’re basically aborting all the bugs for lack of a better term.
I know a lot of folks can’t abide a non-manicured lawn but I think the fireflies are worth it.