As Houston remains quiet, there is magic in the return of fireflies
My 25-year-old daughter moved home last week from Austin, where coronavirus restrictions had shriveled her gig-economy job.
Tuesday night, after dinner, she announced: “We have fireflies!”
Excited, I followed her out to the side of our suburban yard, one of the shaggy areas where I’ve been trying to encourage wildlife.
There was a yellow-green blink. Then another. And another.
We stood there, amazed. “What about out by the bayou?” I asked.
Past our back fence, a floodcontrol easement slopes down to Berry Bayou, a tributary to Sims. The chocolate-milk-colored water is full of waterbirds, fish and turtles.
But the steep hill next to it is only quasi-natural. It was channelized in the ’60s, before developers built Meadowcreek Village, my ranch house subdivision in southeast Houston. The rolling hills and bayou-edge trees were bulldozed to create a giant grass-lined drainage ditch, with mathematically straight 20-foot banks. The edge of my hill meets the water in a concrete curve.
We opened the gate onto the hill. I was hoping to see maybe a dozen tiny blinking lights.
There were hundreds. They blinked, yellow-green, floating just above the high grass on the long sloping hill. They landed on trees that edge my neighbors’ back fences.
We gasped.
I grew up when summer nights were full of lightning bugs. We kids would catch them and keep them in jelly jars with holes punched in the lids. They’d blink on our nightstands as we fell asleep. But my daughter — part of the firefly-less generation — had never seen so many before.
“Magic,” she said.
Such magic abounds in these strange days of coronavirus confinement. My Facebook friends report all sorts of Houston-area wildlife sightings. Some
didn’t surprise me: the hummingbirds, egrets, blue herons, night herons and hawks; the frogs and toads, turtles and snakes; the anoles, skinks and other lizards; the opossums and raccoons.
But turkey vultures in Houston? An eagle north of downtown? An Eastern bluebird in Glenbrook Valley? Roseate spoonbills in a Pearland backyard?
When did red-vented bulbuls, a caged bird from India, go feral here?
I saw a photo of a pensive coyote pausing for thought on a Rice University sidewalk. And a photo of a native orchid — a rarity — growing in the Texas Medical Center’s recently created wetlands.
Nicole Buergers, secretary of the Houston Beekeepers Association, reported that the group has fielded emails about three dozen swarms this year, far more than usual. Normally, Buergers never harvests hives before June. This year, she’s already harvested two.
It appears to be a particularly good spring for wild things. And — maybe even more so — for us social-distancing humans to appreciate them.
Sara Lewis, a firefly researcher and biology professor at
Tufts University, wrote
Sparks, an unusually delightful book by an academic scientist. Houston, she said, has a particularly bad rap among firefly experts. In her book, she quotes Jim Lloyd: “You had them in Houston before they built the city on top of them and paved it over.”
Our bright urban night sky interferes with fireflies’ silent, blinking-light mating calls. We put too much pesticide on our yards, killing the snails that larval fireflies eat. We spray for mosquitoes, taking down fireflies and dragonflies as collateral damage. We pave, we mow, we blow away leaves. We plant lawns of non-native turfgrass that provide no food or shelter for fireflies — or, for that matter, for the vast majority of Houston’s native bugs, birds and beasts. Compared to a humming, buzzing prairie meadow, a golf-course-like, perfectly manicured lawn is depressingly silent — a green dead zone.
To encourage fireflies, Lewis said, we need to take their entire life cycles into account, not just the alluring weeks of their adulthood, but their egg-laying, their hatching and their long larval babyhood.
For most of fireflies’ lives, they have no fire, and they don’t fly. Depending on the species, for anywhere from a few months to a few years, firefly larvae live mostly underground, happy under leaf mulch or a log, and they look something like pillbugs with narrow heads. Voracious little predators, they stick their heads into snails’ shells and slurp out their fleshy bits.
The winged period of their lives is brief and sexy. Many of North America’s 270 or so species don’t eat while adults; they’re all about reproduction.
They seem to like running water, like bayous or ditches. They favor habitats that offer perches of different heights — trees, bushes, tall grass. Darkness is their friend.
Maybe there’s still hope for Houston. The citizen-scientist app iNaturalist shows a reasonable scattering of sightings in the area. And in my personal, very unscientific sampling, their appearances are up this spring.
Chris Garza, a firefly fan and environmental scientist at Holloway, has seen fireflies in places he’d spotted them before: Cullinan Park, in Sugar Land, had a good showing, he said. But the colony at his favorite Heights spot — off the hikeand-bike trail, near White Oak
Bayou, south of Lawrence Park — seemed less energetic than last year. He suspects that nearby construction, and the lights that go with it, are the problem.
The writer John Nova Lomax spotted fireflies on the Memorial Park’s wilder south side, south of the Cullen running center pavilion. Anne Hayden saw a few in her Spring backyard, near Mercer Arboretum and Cypress Creek.
I’ve also heard reports of individual firefly sightings in Cypress and Montrose; and of their return, after a long absence, to a backyard on Brays Bayou.
Is it significant that the floodmitigation project on Brays Bayou used native plants? Or that homeowners are trending away from pesticides like Roundup, and beginning to landscape with native plants? Might we be getting better?
I want to think so. For the last couple of months, my mood has been dark. At night, I make a point of avoiding news about coronavirus and oil prices. But out by the bayou, surrounded by tiny blinking love calls, I wasn’t thinking about those things. Out there, the world seemed big and full of possibility. Even Houston, it seemed, can heal.