We were lucky: A big fat thunderstorm let loose soon after we reached Elkmont campground.
We were lucky not because we’d just gotten our tent up (though that too), but because the downpour seemed to scare away the crowd that might have assembled later that evening in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to witness a rare site: the mating ritual of bioluminescent beetles, Photinus Carolinus, aka the synchronous fireflies.
Of course, we too had been drawn to the flame of the ballyhooed flashers. My friend Meg, who’d been there the past several nights, and who was gracious to share her campsite with us, said there’d been bigger crowds the past two evenings. This was a Sunday, so maybe that also kept the viewing numbers down. As we set up our chairs on the edge of a bowl-like section of forest, where the trees weren’t too thick, she described the previous night’s mass of viewers with red cellophane-shrouded flashlights, walking about. Discussing their health problems, or whatever random things people can’t resist prattling on about even when nature is doing something remarkable and rare and spectacular right before their eyes. I was glad we missed out on that.
Even so, for me, the level of humanity was almost too much. The murmur of voices, an occasional child’s squeal, a dog’s low grumble, the sweep of a headlight across the darkened forest. (We were near a parking lot.) I imagined being there alone, in the dark, fully quiet.
Thalia said that would freak her out. She felt calmed by the low vocal hum around us.
“There could be bears,” she said.
She was right: In fact, we had just seen bears! A mama and two cubs. They trundled across the road several hundred feet from where we waited for night to fall (watch the little cubs scampering at the end!):
We were positioned a short walk from the campground, down the hill from the Elkmont Historic District, where former vacation cabins from the early 20th century are wide open for folks to walk around in, imagining life there decades prior. (I mean, that was me the next day, listening to Gillian Welch on Airpods, a sweet accompaniment to wandering through old, empty rooms overlooking a forest.) It’s magical! But what would be even more magical were the fireflies.
As we waited, regular Lampyridae came out and did their thing. Kinda like an opening act. The sky above darkened very, very slowly. Would the recent storm keep the synchronous guys from doing their thing? None of us knew.
As darkness fell, the first thing I noticed was a firefly who blinked quickly, several times in succession. This was one of them!
The rapid-fire blinking is one of the key differences between Photinus Carolinus and the common Lampyridae of a Southern backyard in June. In an instant they were all around us. After a while I began counting pulses. Most blinked in six to eight pulses of light, then were doused for about as long as a regular firefly.
Again and again, a twinkling symphony—followed by a stretch of swallow-you-up black. And silence, pure silence, but for the humans.
The dark pauses began to tug on me. I felt an urge to lift my arms, cup my hands around the black bowl beneath the canopy, I’m not sure why. What did I need to hold, to grasp? That velvet blackness was almost too much but in a good way, an intoxicating pressure, something I wanted to touch or put in my mouth. I teared up a little. Toward the end of each full, flashless dark stretch came some surge of need within me—and just as that happened, every time, there they were again, the fireflies with their 8-count beats, all over the place. I swiveled, and they were, there too. While it felt like they were displayed before us, that was an illusion. We were surrounded, fully among them, in their land.
What did it look like? Three visuals come to mind.
When you’re in an airplane at night, approaching a city, descending, and the lights below appear to twinkle as you fly over.
When you’re at a concert in a stadium and it’s dark and people’s phones or lighters are flashing all over the place.
When a certain kind of firework explodes and a shower of sparks glitters in the sky before burning out, accompanied by a noise like fabric ripping.
It was reminiscent of any of those things, but patterned, long-lasting (we watched for maybe an hour+?), and absolutely silent. Didn’t it seem like the beetles should make some kind of sound? They made no sound at all. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, a mass of twinkling lights, and then pure dark. Repeat and repeat. We sank into this mating ritual, mesmerized. To our immense delight, there were also blue ghosts among us: Thalia and I both spied them immediately, Phausis reticulata. Tiny, pale blue lights that did not pulse on and off, but wove luminous, steady, and low to the ground. They reminded Thalia of the will o’ the wisps in Brave. So bitsy and lovely, the shy quiet girls at the club, hard to see amidst the showier ones. (But males, actually.)
Mesmerized, yes, I was; but actually, reverent is the word. I was reverent in a way I so rarely have reason to be.
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I wondered: Did the bears, or other woodland creatures, watch this happen every night, or were they oblivious in the way we are all oblivious to things happening around us that happen around us all the time?
There would be no photographing the sight—my phone was useless for that. The inability to document amped up the reverence, I think.
Meg said there were fewer beetles on our night of viewing than she’d seen on earlier nights, maybe because of rain. (To me, there were a lot!) She described wavelike patterns of flashing. For sure, there were times when it felt like the flashes we observed began on one side of our viewing area and made their way to the other side, before all went dark again. But I think sometimes the fireflies get even more tightly synchronized than what we saw, the pulses of light matching one another more precisely?
Each time, there might be one or two fireflies that were the last to go dark, missing the cue, pulsing alone after the others had gone dark. I wondered about those guys. I hope they make it.
Learn more about viewing the synchronous fireflies in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Read “The Lightning Bug Lady” Lynn Faust’s groundbreaking book on the synchronous fireflies: Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs (U of Georgia Press)
I was briefly involved in a project that was trying to mimic the synchronous blinking of fireflies through LED lights and human movements, and through the research learned about this phenomenon. Truly amazing and so lucky you got to experience it.
How beautiful! Thank you sharing this experience with us. The bears would have freaked me out, too!!!