I first learned about blue ghosts last year from Jennifer Frick-Ruppert, a zoologist at Brevard College in western North Carolina. I was at Brevard for a writers’ conference, and Dr. Frick-Ruppert offered to take me to see the ethereal fireflies that glow without blinking. But it rained that night, and lightning bugs don’t fly in a hard rain. I was heartbroken. I was also determined to get back there this year and try again.
When obligations in May made the timing of that goal unreachable, I set my sights on the later-emerging synchronous fireflies of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles East Tennessee and western North Carolina. Synchronous fireflies flash in unison — blinking together and then going dark together before blinking together again. Generations of East Tennesseans have called this extraordinary phenomenon the Light Show. So many people want to see them that except for the lucky visitors whose names are chosen in a lottery each year, that area of the park is closed during firefly mating season. I was not one of the lucky ones.
By the time my family left for vacation in western North Carolina in early June, I’d given up on seeing the famous fireflies of the Appalachian forests.
Then Georgann Eubanks, the author of several books about the wild South, volunteered to put me in touch with the naturalist Tal Galton, owner of Snakeroot Ecotours. She said he could point me toward the fireflies I’d been longing to see.
Mr. Galton did much more than point. On a scouting trip into the Pisgah National Forest the night before, he had found the synchronous fireflies going strong at 3,000 feet, and also a sizable population of blue ghosts at 3,800 feet. He offered to take my whole family to see both.
By climbing to an elevation where temperatures would effectively send us backward in time by 10 days or so, we could experience the peak blue-ghost season of late springtime. Dropping to a lower elevation would bring us back into the peak synchronous season of early summer. Mr. Galton calls this strategy “chasing spring.” He employs it not just for firefly tours but also for wildflower tours and nature retreats.
Lightning bugs — as Southerners grow up calling the little beetles that everyone else calls fireflies — flash to attract a mate. Artificial lights can disrupt the process by making it harder for them to find one another and “may be one of the main drivers of firefly declines,” according to the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
But artificial lights aren’t the only hazard that lightning bugs face. Habitat destruction, lawns cut too short, toxic garden chemicals, mosquito-eradication services, climate change — they all contribute to making the planet less hospitable to these magical creatures.
Lightning bugs are found on every continent except Antarctica, with more than 2,200 species identified worldwide. New species continue to be discovered. Firefly data is incomplete, but populations appear to be in decline around the globe. The Firefly Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature notes that 14 percent of assessed species — including 18 North American species — are at risk of extinction. Nearly half of the assessed species involved incomplete data, however, so those numbers are probably higher. According to Firefly Atlas, a citizen-science initiative of the Xerces Society, “As many as one in three North American fireflies may be at risk of extinction.”
We met Mr. Galton and his wife, Jessica Ruegg, at Pisgah National Forest just after sunset, following a gravel service road through a forest blooming with mountain laurel. Driving without headlights to allow our eyes to adjust to the darkness, we arrived at the target site in time to “let the night settle,” as Mr. Galton put it, before the blue-ghost courtship display began in earnest.
The darkness that settled was like no darkness I’ve ever known. I could not tell the dark trees from the dark sky. There were no trees. There was no road. I was the trees and I was the road and I was the murmured voices of the people I love best in all the world. It was so dark that a great hand could have reached down to upend me, and but for the blood pounding in my ears I would have had no idea that I dangled upside down.
In any other context, I might have found the experience dislocating, but we had come to the forest to see lightning bugs, and darkness was the whole point.
Blue ghosts don’t blink. Gliding over the leaf litter, emitting a faint but steady blue-green light, blue ghosts live up to their name, transforming the forest into an otherworldly landscape. But the light emitted by blue ghosts, each the size of a grain of uncooked rice, isn’t actually blue — it’s closer to the greenish color of our lightning bugs at home. And though blue ghosts are often characterized in the media as rare, populations can be found in many wooded areas of the Midwest and Eastern states — including, it turns out, Davidson County, Tenn., where I live.
Blue ghosts seem rare because they’re impossible to see except in total darkness. And human beings have flooded the world with so much light that we no longer know how to see in the dark, even when we seek it out. It takes about 20 minutes in utter darkness for people to recover their night vision. How many of us give 20 minutes to darkness anymore? Or could even find that kind of profound darkness if we looked for it?
My eyes cast downward to see the blue ghosts, I failed to notice that stars had emerged from the cold mountain sky and now outlined the trees, finally visible to me again as shapes. The stars in the sky were winking. The stars in the understory were glowing. It was everything I’d waited a year to see and far more than I’d even known to wish for.
An hour later, still without headlights, we followed Mr. Galton’s truck downhill to see the synchronous fireflies. There the understory of the forest around us was so dense that we could see the syncing effect only when the fireflies were flying above the road itself. Their flash train carried down the open gravel road in waves made of lights, exactly like a wave made of humans in a sports stadium.
Mr. Galton was inspired to start Snakeroot Ecotours after a visit to Costa Rica more than a decade ago. “I saw how the country has embraced ecotourism as a way to protect and honor their forests, and I couldn’t help but think: Our Southern Appalachian forests back home are just as special, and deserve the same reverence,” he said. It’s a crucial idea: To save the forests, he is teaching people to love them.
Following Mr. Galton’s brake lights farther down the mountain, we reached an open field near the end of the service road. Across the field, yet another lightning bug species was on fire in the treetops, each sending out a single powerful flash. “People instinctively use the name Flashbulb when they first see one superbright single flasher,” writes Lynn Frierson Faust in “Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs,” the definitive field guide to fireflies of the Eastern and central United States and Canada.
She is right. For the rest of my life, I will not forget seeing those fireflies across the dark field, each one igniting a single flash of brightness, like the flashcubes on my father’s old Instamatic, like the stars themselves come down to the trees.
This week will bring the summer solstice, the shortest night of the year. In a world awash in artificial light — a world of magical creatures imperiled by our lights and our machines — there’s something especially poignant about that moment when spring gives way to summer. When I was younger, I didn’t register the lengthening nights of summer and fall with the same attention I gave to the growing light of winter and spring, but I think I understand darkness better now.
The post In Search of the Lost Fireflies appeared first on New York Times.