Lightning Bugs

Nice, was watching a show where they showed up as a digital CGI and it made me wish for the real thing. Glad someone got to see them.

Don’t use pesticides. Don’t hire lawn services to “do treatments”:on your lawn. Perfectly green lawns are meaningless. They result in serious disruption of the earth and they take away simple pleasures like lightning bugs. When you kill grubs, you’re killing lightning bugs too. And tree frogs that make ridiculous noises when it’s springtime and when it’s hot & humid. And you prevent birds from living because their parents couldn’t gather enough ground insects to feed them as nestlings, so they starved. I look out at my “lawn” every day in spring & summer & it’s filled with birds gleaning the ground and pulling out bugs. In the evening I hear the robins singing vespers and sparrows chipping “good night.” When they wake me early in the morning, I’m fine with it. I’m supposed to be hearing that. It’s normal & natural. If I can’t get back to sleep I turn on the fan to drown it out & fall back to sleep again.

Its the males that shine. Amazing creatures.

I love them. It’s like having a tiny fireworks show every night.

Gloaming. I like that.

This reminds me of a Pierre post.

Love lightning bugs! When I was a kid we would pop their butts off and put them on our earlobes as earrings. Glow-in-the-dark was big at the time (late 80s)

Makes me nostalgic for summers in the Midwest.

[quote]Don’t use pesticides. Don’t hire lawn services to “do treatments”:on your lawn.

When I was a kid (many, many years ago) my area was filled with lightning bugs in the evening.

Now only an occasional sighting.

Oh! I'm jealous. I loved them as a kid growing up in the Midwest and loved seeing that in Central Park. I live in New Orleans now and the stuff used to mass spray neighborhoods against mosquitos kills them so I don't get to see them anymore. Enjoy them.

[quote]It's the gloaming where I live

But oh, that teacher who sang there!

WW to OP for using “gloaming”.

Fireflies! Where are you from, OP? Texas?

For OP.

[quote] Fireflies! Where are you from, OP? Texas?

It's odd you would say that, since Texas is one of the few states that are are split between people saying "fireflies" and "lightning bugs.,"

At dusk:

I grew up in an area of the country without fireflies, and I never saw them while living in NYC in my early 20s, but when I moved to north Florida, I was mesmerized when they suddenly showed up in my forested backyard around late April. I was over 30. A magical sight indeed. I'm back to a firefly-less part of the country, but I miss them. I know the "gloaming" only from The Heather on the Hill from Brigadoon. But I agree, OP gets props for using it.

I love fireflies, I've only been around them a few times in my life but find them magical

Fireflies in the gloaming:

[quote] Now only an occasional sighting.

It is 100% due to pesticides and earth “grooming,” ie only allowing green sod to survive. Pesticides kill the larvae, herbicides that kill weeds take away valuable, loose land cover and replace it with tight, pesticide-laden sod. Airplanes dump pesticides on crops but also everywhere else in summer to kill mosquitos. When I was a kid, we got bitten by mosquitos, so we went inside at night and stayed with our families, watching tv and playing board games. We stayed away from swampy areas. Now swampy areas are filled in and covered in malls & parking lots, houses & driveways. We’ve killed a great deal of the planet in a short time just so we won’t get bitten by mosquitos or get “patchy areas” of lawn due to grubs.

Parks and sides of highways also have insecticides and herbicides drenched over them. All so we don’t have a .000001% chance of getting encephalitis. As for malaria, it’s curable.

Tick hysteria due to Lyme disease has been a boon to pesticide industry. In my area only one road leads to an area of about a hundred thousand homes, most of them owned by millionaires. One of the biggest signs on the roadway says

TICKS

It’s for a pest company. And guess who runs pest companies? Trump voters. Because pest companies used to be called “exterminators” and they dealt with cockroaches and mice/rats. So the lowest form of individuals worked for an exterminator. I mean, bad enough to be an exterminator, but to be the employee of an exterminator was even lower on the social ladder. Most of these guys didn’t have a GED. Now, high schools give everyone a diploma and almost nobody ever fails a GED.

So exterminators loved the hysteria about Lyme disease. Then there were even more tick diseases - babesiosis, erlichiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tick encephalitis (extremely rare), alpha gal syndrome . That’s when “exterminators” turned into “pest professionals.” But they’re still the same people. They’re people who need to make a living and want you to kill stuff. If you don’t kill, they don’t eat. So they sell you every pesticide imaginable. They sternly warn you of how this bug will become 159,000 bugs in two months time.

“And those 159,000 bugs will attract mice & rats who eat those bugs. Then your house will be like, destroyed, I’m tellinya. I seen it happen, oh god, we’ve had some whoppers. This lady had to have her house pulled down it was so bad. Peoples houses catch fire! The rats eat through the wires!”

Keep in mind you’re listening to Donald Trump’s dumbest voter spinning you tales of what those cave crickets in your garage are gonna do your house. Or how you’re gonna die if a tick gets on you. “I seen this lady..... all her kids got sick from Lyme disease & her dogs died from it. It was horrible.”