FIREFLY LORE
As children, we enjoyed chasing firefly lights across the lawn .
They came out shortly after the sun had gone to rest, and on quiiet, dampish nights. in particular, they were to be had in abundance. It seëms to me we always called them ”lightening bugs” but the books and magazines called “fireflys” or "fireflies".
They were different from all the flying things we knew.They were obvouisly not flies; certainly not glow worms to us and it was only later we discovered them to be a form of soft-shelled beetle. They emitted brilliant lights as they flew and we developed a syetm of catching them. The light was bright enough to fool your eyes for a second and you had to scoop your hand through the blackness ahead of where the bug had been when the light was shone. They moved faster than one might think, too. so it took some skill to gather the hundreds we often did. We put them in glass jars and hung them about the yard as "lanterns."
There was a special element of mystery about the firefly which had a special appeal for kids, I suppose. We wonder, of course, how they made such a bright light over and over again. We leared in a rather vague sense, that it was done by chemicals in their bodies which, when mixed with air, glowed as s brilliant burst of light. It was interesting to hold a bug on your hand and watch him crawl to the utmost end of the highest fingere to take off. If, however, you hnd down at the last moment, he reversed his path and started to climb once again to the highest take-off spot. We devised other ways of amusing ourslevs with them, and some of those acts, as we look back at it all, and as our parents sometimes told us, was "cruel ". When we had obtained piles of them we sometimes poured them on the sidewalk and ran over and throuigh and over them with our bikes or roller skates. It made a fabulous display of of flickering bike and skate wheels. If you "squshed" some on the sidewalk, the made a glow which stayed there until the chemicals were used up.
We had a list of superstiions about those bugs, too. The chemials were, of course, considered to be poisonous and if you got any of the goo in your eyes you would go blind. We noticed that birds did not eat them and you only rarely saw them entangled in a spider web.
How did this page come to be?
I read in a newsaperr that the 1928 record by the Mills Brothers quartet was the only song about a bug that ever became a popular song which stayed on the charts for weeks. The item said the song was all about fireflies. It was called "Glow Worm" : Thus far, I have not found that the glow worm is the transient stage of the firefly . They do not give off aa light, but they do glow a bit, very softly in the dark. I remember the tune and liked it, but I never associated it with lightning bugs over the years. I had to do some reading and I have learned a lot about the firefly - called "lightning bugs" the south. Maybe someone, somewhere, has called them glow worms.
There are over two hundred species in the United States and it will vary a great deal depending on climate conditions.They like dampness and in the pupae stage eat grubs and earthworms. There are about thirty-five species in our area and yours may have more or less. They emit various tints of light, too - some wtih a hint of green, other of blue, some bnight white and larger species specialize in a yellow-tined off-and-on light. If the weather is dry the rascal stays in the pupa stage until it gets wetter and warmer. They may stay in the earth two or three years before becoming adults. The usual life span is seven days.
All of our destruction of so many of them, and the civilized ways we have of gettig rid of them today by exessive spraying and by draining swamlands where they prosper, has no sign of them disappering. Their light is not a simple thing either. Four chemicals are involved plus air and water..
The tiny, fragile firefly is one of the most interesting creatures of all.
A.L.M. January 22, 2004 [c492wds]
