I first learned about the blue ghosts last year from Jennifer Flick Rupert, a zoologist at Brevard College in western North Carolina. I was in Brevard for a writers’ conference when Dr. Flick Rupert offered to take me to see the fantastical, unblinking fireflies. But it was raining that night, and fireflies can’t fly in driving rain. I was heartbroken. I resolved to go back there again this year and give it another go.
With a May schedule putting that goal out of reach, I set my sights on the late-emerging, synchronous fireflies in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. Synchronized fireflies light up in unison: they blink together, dim together, then blink together again. For generations, people in East Tennessee have called this amazing phenomenon a “light show.” Because so many people want to see the phenomenon, that area of ​​the park is closed during the firefly mating season except for a lucky few visitors selected by lottery each year. I was not one of the lucky ones.
By the time my family left for a vacation to western North Carolina in early June, I had given up on seeing the fireflies for which the Appalachian forests are famous.
Then Georgian Eubanks, author of several books about southern nature, offered to introduce me to naturalist Tal Galton, owner of Snakeroot Ecotours, who she said could show me where to find the fireflies I’d always wanted to see.
Galton did more than just point: on a previous night’s scouting of Pisgah National Forest, he’d spotted Synchronized Fireflies active at 3,000 ft and a good number of Blue Ghosts at 3,800 ft. He offered to take the whole family to see both.
Climb to an altitude where temperatures drop back by 10 days and you’ll experience the peak of blue ghost season in late spring. Drop back down and you’ll be back to the same season in peak early summer. Galton calls this strategy “chasing spring,” and he uses it not only for firefly tours, but also for wildflower tours and nature walks.
Fireflies, like the tiny beetles Southerners grew up calling fireflies, glow to attract mates, and artificial lighting disrupts this process by making it harder for fireflies to find each other, “and may be one of the main factors in the firefly decline,” according to the nonprofit Xerses Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
But artificial lighting isn’t the only danger fireflies face: habitat destruction, over-mowing, toxic garden chemicals, mosquito control services and climate change are all making the Earth an inhospitable place for these mysterious creatures.
Fireflies live on every continent except Antarctica, and more than 2,200 species have been identified worldwide. New species continue to be discovered. Although data on fireflies is incomplete, populations appear to be declining worldwide. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Firefly Specialist Group notes that 14 percent of assessed species are threatened with extinction, including 18 species in North America; however, this number is probably higher, as data is incomplete for nearly half of assessed species. According to the Firefly Atlas, a citizen science initiative of the Xerces Society, “One-third of North American fireflies may be at risk of extinction.”
We met Galton and his wife, Jessica Rueg, in Pisgah National Forest just after sunset. We drove down a gravel road through a forest of blooming laurels. We drove without headlights to allow our eyes to adjust to the dark, and arrived at our destination just in time for, as Galton put it, “night to settle in” and before the blue ghosts’ mating display began in earnest.
The darkness that fell upon me was the darkest I had ever experienced. I could not distinguish the dark trees from the dark sky. There were no trees. There was no path. I was the trees, the path, and the whispering voices of the people I love most in the world. It was so dark that I felt like a large hand could reach out from below and flip me over. If it hadn’t been for the blood pounding in my ears, I would not have realized I was hanging upside down.
Under other circumstances, this experience might have been disorienting, but we had come to the forest to see the fireflies, and darkness was the goal.
Blue ghosts don’t blink. As they glide across the leaves, emitting a faint but steady blue-green light, the blue ghost lives up to its name and transforms the forest into an otherworldly landscape. But the light emitted by these bugs, which are about the size of a grain of uncooked rice, isn’t actually blue; it’s closer to the greenish hue of our home fireflies. Though often portrayed as rare in the media, blue ghosts live in many wooded areas across the Midwest and East, including where I live in Davidson County, Tennessee.
Blue Ghost Seem It is rare because we cannot see except in complete darkness. And humanity has flooded the world with so much light that we no longer know what it looks like in darkness, even if we search for it. In complete darkness, it takes about 20 minutes for night vision to recover. How many of us would spend 20 minutes in darkness, or even find such deep darkness if we searched for it?
I didn’t notice as I cast my eyes down to see the blue ghosts, the stars emerging from the cold mountain sky, outlining the trees, finally becoming visible as shapes again. The stars in the sky were twinkling. The lower stars were shining. It was everything I’d been waiting for all year, and so much more than I’d ever hoped for.
An hour later, without headlights, we followed Galton’s truck downhill to watch the synchronized fireflies. The understory of the surrounding forest was so dense that the synchronization effect was only visible when the fireflies were flying above the road. The string of firefly flashes formed a wave of light that traveled down the wide gravel road, just like the waves of people at a sports stadium.
Galton’s motivation for starting Snake Route Ecotours came from a visit to Costa Rica over 10 years ago. “Seeing how Costa Rica has embraced ecotourism as a way to protect and respect its forests made me think, ‘My own Southern Appalachian forests are just as special and should be respected in the same way,'” he says. It’s an important idea. In order to protect the forests, Galton is teaching people to love them.
Using Galton’s brake lights as a guide, we made our way down the mountain and came to a large field near the end of the service road. Across the field, another species of firefly was burning in the treetops, each emitting a single, powerful flash. “On first sighting a single, extremely bright firefly, people instinctively use the name flashbulb,” writes Lynn Frierson Faust in “Firefly, Glowworm, Firefly,” the definitive field guide to fireflies of the eastern and central U.S. and Canada.
She was right: for the rest of my life I’ll remember the sight of fireflies dancing across a dark field, each one sending out a flash of light that made it seem as if the stars themselves were descending on the trees, like the flashcubes on my dad’s old Instamatic.
This week marks the summer solstice, the shortest night of the year. In a world saturated with artificial light, a world of magical creatures endangered by our lights and machines, there is something especially poignant about the moment when spring turns to summer. When I was younger, I didn’t realize that the nights get longer in summer and fall just as they get lighter in winter and spring, but I think I have a better understanding of darkness now.
