wikimedia, Claudeverett
Lightning Bugs
When I was two, my mother flew with me from her army base in Germany to my grandmother's home in Annapolis, She and my father wanted to tour more of Europe, so she had to unload me somewhere.
Her mother was willing, even happy, to care for me. It's strange but there it is. That summer in Annapolis was the first time I saw a jar full of lightning bugs. At least, it’s the first I remember. My uncles filled a tall jar, half as big as me, with the blinking, glowing angels. I even caught one myself. (Well, it landed on me and an uncle scooped it off.) They made the jar a tinfoil lid with holes poked in the top.
"Now he'll sleep," said Uncle Mike. Apparently, I had started bursting into tears at bedtime because I was missing out on the lightning bugs. This was his answer.
All my uncles, even the adult ones, wanted a jar of lightning bugs anyway. I was their excuse to make one and keep it. They placed it on the floor next to my bed. As soon as everyone left, I crept down to lie on the floor next to the glass. I curled around it, the closest I could come to hugging the swarm, and I stared at the tiny bodies and their lights. They were beautiful. They were sacred. They were holy spirits so far as I was concerned. They were not a sign of anything, just a form of awe dressed in beetle costumes with wings. They inspired, in me, a trembling wonder.
In the summer when I was four years old and again when I was five, my parents sent me to live with my grandparents. The Stockett family bug jar tradition continued. I was twice as tall by then but the glass vessel still seemed reassuringly large. I think my grandfather and uncles may have resorted to an ancient pickle jug. Pickles meant 'whole cucumbers,' at least in my family at the time, and those required a container of significant size.
"We need to use a real lid," one of my uncles decided.
Apparently I had removed the tinfoil from an earlier version or one of my uncles had done it and blamed me.
"Put it up where he can see it," my grandmother told them. "Not on the floor."
My grandmother had found me sleeping on the bedroom floor earlier. She was determined to put a stop to it. She enforced her stay-in-the-bed rules by checking on me and the lightning bug jar every fifteen minutes.
I climbed down to be close to the jar anyway. I had discovered I could hear the floorboards squeak when my grandmother approached. If I paid attention, I could climb into bed and pretend to be asleep before she opened the door. This time, I discovered something more, too. My uncles had used an awl to make the holes in the lid. I had watched them do the job. But those holes were too big. The beetles could climb out through them, so they did. They flew around the room, blinking. Some of them landed on me to rest. It was wonderful.
When I was five, my little brother came with me to my grandparents' house. That year, we had a harder time collecting lightning bugs.
"Damn pesticides," my grandfather told us. "They're doing the job, killing bugs. But still."
No one really meant to kill the lightning bugs. Everyone noticed it happening, though. Every summer at Riva Road, we found fewer of them. At my parents house, in the grassy and wooded park, blank spots appeared in the lightning bug swarms. One year, they disappeared from the grassy fields. The next, a strip of creek came up barren despite running through the shelter of the forest. The year after, swaths of woodland fell dark. The next and the next, the few fireflies remaining around us grew sparser and harder to find. The only ones we could locate lived in the woods.
We also started calling the bugs 'fireflies.' I'm not sure why. Maryland is an odd state, linguistically. Once, it was southern. Over the years, we adopted northern terms here. Even more dramatically, Maryland became cosmopolitan and suburban, influenced by the big cities of Baltimore and Washington, DC.
We adopted modern insecticides. We built more, which meant we compacted our soils with bulldozers and heavy trucks. Compacted soils killed the lightning bugs and other insects that previously spent most of their lifetimes underground. We sanitized our yards and cleaned up the leaf litter many species of fireflies require to live.
The capture jars got small, then they disappeared. We stopped catching fireflies. Instead, we laid down in the dark, in the grass, to watch. Over the summers, the beetle mating seasons grew briefer. Several species of firefly seemed to disappear. There were too many types to catalog, at first, and we didn't understand the types or we didn't consider the variety to be important.
Now there are societies trying to track the destruction of the fireflies, just as there are groups watching butterflies disappear or birds go extinct.
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What I'm hoping to do, where I am:
1. Is there a way to de-compact our soils? Maryland has lots of clay soils. Once heavy machinery has compacted them, I think the best way forward may be to create new, loose topsoil and spread it over our yards. I'm making topsoil with compost but the process takes years, at the least.
1a. Maybe I should buy some topsoil.
2. Create and stack leaf litter. This is a tough one to do artistically - that is, to ensure the neighbors like it. Leaf litter tends to blow around. Keeping it in spots around my yard may involve some mini-fencing. If I can do it, though, it would help some kinds of fireflies re-start.
3. Plant native shrubs and trees. We've been here only a few years but almost everything in our yard was non-native when we arrived. I tend to like fruit trees, too. Paw-paws and red mulberries are natives. They seem worth consideration.
4. Let areas of the yard turn to tall grass. Like stacking leaf litter, this will be tough but it should be doable.
5. Have a safe water feature in the yard for the species of fireflies that need water. Honestly, I'm not sure how to do this without having even more mosquitoes than we do. I may give up on this one.
6. Some fireflies feed on snails and slugs. Well, we've got that covered. Ugh.
7. Some fireflies feed on plant pollen or nectar. With buddleia and russian sage, we might have enough but, then again, we might need to plant native flowers for fireflies, not the ones we've got.