Jul 7, 2023 4 min read

A lightning bug landed on me the other night.

Thinking it was something more ordinary, I reached to swat it away from my shoulder and then it turned its little belly light on. I’m pretty sure it was my first such encounter in a year or so.

“A lightning bug,” I said to my friends who were sitting out with me. Some people call them fireflies, but not my family.

Where did all the lightning bugs go? Turns out that of the 150 species of the lightning bugs in the United States, about a third are in danger of going extinct. The reasons are predictable: development is chasing them away, pesticides are killing them and, also, there’s too much light pollution.

Growing up in Finleyville, we had one of the bigger backyards on our street; it was flat and grassy and led to some woods at the bottom end. As darkness fell, the woods would start blinking as the bugs began flirting with each other. Sometimes we kids would already be bathed and in our pajamas when this started, but we’d put on shoes and head out for the hunt. Peanut butter jars were our traps and their new homes, as we scooped the bugs out of the dark and dropped them in. We could feel their wings squirming between our fingers.

For little kids, the twinkly night was magic, but a predictable magic. At age 5, if I were to look out the window to see winged unicorns flying above the yard, I would have accepted it as one of the things that happens in the summer. Seen with such fresh wonder, anything was possible – and somehow logical.

Now, the summer fireflies strike me as weird and unlikely and exotic. What combination of intelligent creation and evolution gave us that wonderfulness – these flying bugs that talk to each other by igniting their torsos. Showoffs.

There are places on this continent known for huge gatherings of lightning bugs; if you park your car on the edge of that forest and blink your headlights, the bugs will wink back, and then start winking for a mate, almost in unison. If I were to list the magical things of summer, I think the lightning bugs would have to be right at the top, next to the morning visits of a cardinal to my bedroom window, and the way sunflowers shoot up by a foot overnight. Oh, and the way a whole field of sunflowers will turn their faces, together, toward the sun, as a ballpark full of fans would turn to salute the flag.

As children, we knew the lightning bugs came along with the mosquitoes and the sunburn and games of kickball in the yard. Neighbor boys showed us how to remove the glowing bellies from the bugs and write words on the sidewalk with the goo, and 60 years on I still cringe at the cruelty of that.

Adults were more humane; they poked holes in the jars’ metal lids, to give our captured bugs some air and a chance to live beyond that one night. Sometimes we’d put a few blades of grass in there, but for what? Food? Bedding? We didn’t know. By morning, some of them had died and we freed the others.

The ones that survived crawled into the tallest grass they could find, to sleep it off and probably to hide from us kids, only to wake up their belly lights again at nightfall. With empty jars in our hands, we would venture out into the night once again, to capture and own some of that magic.