Lightning Bugs

Well, I finally got a few pictures of lightning bugs! Well, sort of. I mean, I don't have a fancy camera, or any know-how, so they're just yellow streaks... But I promise, they're genuine, lightning bug-colored streaks!

I'm a lightning bug nerd, I guess. (Hey, there's the title of my next blog!)

Besides the beauty and magic of those little flashes in the dark, they have a back-story like Susan Boyle! Lightning bugs have to endure many months (and sometimes YEARS) of life as larvae, crawling around in the mud, eating and gathering strength, then waiting quietly as pupae, before they can finally emerge to fly...for only a few weeks or months! Talk about paying your dues...

Lightning Bug Awareness:
First, there are about 50 males to every female. So mating is difficult for the males, who are often devoured by the female after they mate...a very high-maintenance date.

Second, the females are flightless, so they climb to the upper tips of the blades of grass to signal for a mate. It's the lonely bachelors who fly around, bless their hearts, looking for a date, and they don't usually fly very high either since all the ladies are on the dance floor below.

Third, lightning bugs fly very slowly, and that, along with the predicatable timing of their flashes (about every 5 seconds), makes them really easy to follow (once you've seen a flash), and therefore usually easy to catch, for a flying insect. This situation is obviously bad news for the lightning bugs, but has made for a long tradition of fun for kids on Spring and Summer evenings.

Lightning bug in flight !

May 3rd, 2009 was the best night this year for lighning bug watching! They were everywhere...click on the pictures to enlarge

(Click on any picture to enlarge)

Obviously I need a better camera for these shots...

IMPORTANT: If you MUST catch a lightning bug, and I REALLY wish you wouldn't for a number of reasons (the least of which is that it's just not sporting, since they can't defend themselves at all- they don't sting, bite, or pinch, and they practically float there in place, totally helpless!), please NEVER catch one that's on or near the ground! If it's on the ground, it's probably a female, the 1/50, and if we want more lightning bugs next year and the year after that, we need to leave those few females free to do their thing with the gentlemen lightning bugs. But really, NO lightening bug male or female, deserves to waste precious time sitting in an old mayonnaise jar anyway... it's just basic lightning bug ethics...

Being a lightning bug nerd, almost every Spring and Summer evening around dusk, I either sit on the porch (or take Claude for a walk around the neighborhood) to look for lightning bugs. You don't want to wait too late; lightning bugs aren't really nocturnal; they're "crepuscular", which means they're most active at twilight (and sometimes, rarely, before dawn), which makes any one insect's chances of having a successful date even less likely.

Anyway, Saturday, April 18th was my first lightning bug siting of 2009! This is a big deal for me, but unfortunately, I only had my cell phone camera with me, so I couldn't get any pictures. But since then I've been taking the Nikon.