In Search of the Lost Fireflies
I first learned about blue ghosts last year from Jennifer Frick-Ruppert, a zoologist at Brevard College in western North Carolina. I was at Brevard for a writers’ conference, and Dr. Frick-Ruppert offered to take me to see the ethereal fireflies that glow without blinking. But it rained that night, and lightning bugs don’t fly in a hard rain. I was heartbroken. I was also determined to get back there this year and try again.
When obligations in May made the timing of that goal unreachable, I set my sights on the later-emerging synchronous fireflies of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles East Tennessee and western North Carolina. Synchronous fireflies flash in unison — blinking together and then going dark together before blinking together again. Generations of East Tennesseans have called this extraordinary phenomenon the Light Show. So many people want to see them that except for the lucky visitors whose names are chosen in a lottery each year, that area of the park is closed during firefly mating season. I was not one of the lucky ones.
By the time my family left for vacation in western North Carolina in early June, I’d given up on seeing the famous fireflies of the Appalachian forests.
Then Georgann Eubanks, the author of several books about the wild South, volunteered to put me in touch with the naturalist Tal Galton, owner of Snakeroot Ecotours. She said he could point me toward the fireflies I’d been longing to see.
Mr. Galton did much more than point. On a scouting trip into the Pisgah National Forest the night before, he had found the synchronous fireflies going strong at 3,000 feet, and also a sizable population of blue ghosts at 3,800 feet. He offered to take my whole family to see both.
By climbing to an elevation where temperatures would effectively send us backward in time by 10 days or so, we could experience the peak blue-ghost season of late springtime. Dropping to a lower elevation would bring us back into the peak synchronous season of early summer. Mr. Galton calls this strategy “chasing spring.” He employs it not just for firefly tours but also for wildflower tours and nature retreats.
