Fireflies, owls and other creatures inspired nighttime curiosity

It all started so long ago and it all started so wondrously.

I was terrified of the dark whether it filled a room in the house or the backyard. In my child’s mind, darkness was a shapeless, faceless monster that could make your life miserable.

But my fear motivated me to wonder.

Those blinky things that come out at night — some people called them “lightning bugs” while other people called them “fireflies.” Curiosity made me wonder why something that could make its own light would blink on and off during the night.

Reading about them, I learned that they are neither bugs nor flies; they’re beetles. So, I wondered, why don’t people call them “lightning beetles” or “firebeetles” or “blinky-beetles?”

Wondering enticed me to sit at my bedroom window on summer nights just to watch the show of blinking insect lights. And that watching got me listening to what everyone in my family called “locusts.”

The first book I ever bought for myself — it’s still on my bookshelf! — was a thin thing about insects that cost me 25 cents. In it I learned that those noisy things that drone at night are not locusts. I learned that locusts are grasshoppers but those noisy things are cicadas.

Those cicadas moved me beyond just hearing something to listening, and listening to the night brought owls into my life.

I could sit at my bedroom window while my parents, assuming I was asleep, watched the Red Skelton Show. With door closed, night light on and window open, I learned to attend what I was hearing with the same concentration that I devoted to seeing.

Eventually, I learned to listen and to watch with equal discipline at the same time.

I could both see the shadowy forms of bats and hear their erratic squeaking and chipping. Size of the shadows and pattern of the wingbeats told me all the bats were not the same though they could not tell which bats they were.

Hearing my grandparents and great aunts and uncles reminiscing about their own childhoods, I heard them remembering how cricket chirping indicated temperature. So, I listened to crickets chirping in the night and counted number of chirps in a minute then in portions of minutes.

The numbers and the times convinced me that arithmetic really was worth learning. So I did. A little bit more than before engaging the crickets.

Backpacking and studying owls separately coaxed me away from my fear of darkness; but blinky-beetles and screech-owls, cicadas and crickets prepared me to let go of that fear.

These memories come to mind frequently as I take my end-of-day walks around the neighborhood. Great horned owls nest here, and their territorial hooting has recently faded as their nestlings’ food-begging screeches have amplified.

And while listening into the darkness for owls, I look into that same darkness for the red fox and the raccoon that secretly share our living space as neighbors. Their toeprints in the snow and their scat piles reveal their whereabouts even when darkness of night veils them in secrecy.

All those years ago, walking in the dark of night was unthinkable. Now, all these years later, not walking at night has become unthinkable.

The wonder of Life rescued me from the monster of darkness and my nightly walks are a commitment of thanks.