To submit your own report email burger@burger.com
Please include your city/town and state, and the date of your sighting. Include as many details as you can, such as numbers of fireflies, location (rural/city/wooded area, etc), temperature, time, and so on. Thanks for helping with this project.
Below are reports from Iowa, listed in date order, alphabetically by city.
Bettendorf:
June 27, 1999: A reader writes: My son and I love finding and chasing fireflies. We have been doing this since he was 2 years old, and he is now 6. I've purchased books, musical
tapes, magazines, and have made fireflies from Mountain Dew bottles using
glow sticks. We anxiously look for our first sighting each year and it
happened this week! What fun we've had catching them on our hot humid
nights. Last night we caught 23 in a short period of time. We live in
Bettendorf, Iowa, near a small creek, have long grasses near the creek and see
them come out just as the sun is going down. After we catch them we open our
firefly catcher and see how long it takes for them all to climb out and find
their way to the open sky once again. It is a fond memory I had as a child
and love reliving it through my son. (He seems to be as enchanted with it as
I am.) :-)
.
Cedar Rapids:
June 27, 2005: Greg Price reports: While driving from Waterloo, Iowa to Cedar Rapids, Iowa - between 10:00 PM
and 11:30 PM, and after a thunderstorm, I observed thousands of fireflies in
the corn and soybean fields adjacent to I-380. Stopped twice at rural
road exits to watch away from the highway and was amazed to see
literally thousands of sparkling lights per acre of farmland. They
were clustered in the grass median at the overpasses and a dozen or so
were collected by my windshield and left brightly glowing smears which
dimmed after about five minutes. This is my first summer in firefly
country and I must say that these creatures are one of nature's
treasures.
August 8, 2000: A reader writes: I couldn't believe it when I saw a website for fireflies. I wanted to share my "firefly" story with you. I tell my new friends that fireflies saved my life.
I lived in Southern Calif all my life and hated it for the last 10 years I lived there. In 1991 I was divorced after 21 years. My daughter was grown and had a child of her own. I went through a depression that ended with a trip to the emergency room. Soon after that my best friend invited me to go with her and some of our friends to Cedar Rapids to bowl. We were driving and since I had never driven any further than Las Vegas, I said ok.
I was still very weak so I slept in the back of the van. After one session of bowling (I didn't bowl), we went to the house of a cousin of one of my friends. It was a very warm evening and all the kids in the neighborhood was running around playing. One of them ran up to me with a jar filled with fireflies. She told me what they were and I just stared in amazement. All I could think was, "Wow, there really are fireflies". I thought fireflies were something that Walt Disney thought up and put in his Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. And with that I decided that if this was out "there", what else was I missing? My life took a big turn. I went back to California, quit my job, took an early retirement, signed divorce papers and moved to Missouri. I only stayed a month. I didn't want to be that far away from my new grandson, so I moved to Vegas. There weren't any fireflies but there was a new life for me. Since then I have moved to Maine and am now living in Southern New Jersey with my new husband. Everything is wonderful and I often sit outside the house in the dark, warm evenings watching my firefly friends. I think about where I would be today if I had never seen a firefly. I like where I am and am very grateful for the firefly. Life is worth living and that is what I intend to do as long as I can.
I hope you are able to get the fireflies back to Houston. You can't have any of mine. Thank you for this website and others I can visit for more information. I will visit often.
Coon Rapids:
August 7, 2000: A reader writes: live in the bottem of a rural, wooded river valley in west central Iowa in Coon Rapids, Iowa .
I believe the number of fireflies has been increasing here over the last
several years. We have been working on recontructed diverse prairies,
replacing improved brome grass pasture, which is my hypothesis on why the
numbers are going up. We have never had ariel pesticide spraying here
(though in the past there was ariel herbicide sprayed here). I have
noticed that there are more fireflies in tall grasses than in cattle-grazed
land. There are also more fireflies in the grasses than in the timber.
Council Bluffs:
July 19, 2002: Diane Enoch writes: Thanks for the website and information on fireflies. I was just back in Council Bluffs, Iowa; Des Moines, Iowa; and Omaha, Nebraska and the fireflies were one of my special treats. I now
live in Southern California, and I really miss the July evenings bejeweled with
those
tiny critters. I hope Houston is able to lure them back. I remember
hearing crickets (or some type of critter) at the same time I see the
fireflies. Does Houston still have them? I was in Houston last
August/September and it was too rainy to know if there were any type of
critters out there.
Des Moines:
July 19, 2002: Diane Enoch writes: Thanks for the website and information on fireflies. I was just back in Council Bluffs, Iowa; Des Moines, Iowa; and Omaha, Nebraska and the fireflies were one of my special treats. I now
live in Southern California, and I really miss the July evenings bejeweled with
those
tiny critters. I hope Houston is able to lure them back. I remember
hearing crickets (or some type of critter) at the same time I see the
fireflies. Does Houston still have them? I was in Houston last
August/September and it was too rainy to know if there were any type of
critters out there.
Fairfield:
August, 1997: A readers folks saw huge numbers of fireflies in Fairfield, Iowa.
Grinnel:
August 6, 2000: A reader writes: It is always a special treat to drive through central Iowa at dusk and see the lightning bugs come out. On July 14th, 2000, on the way from Minneapolis to Grinnell, Iowa, we noticed a bumper crop of lightning bugs. At my parent's home, a couple miles west of Grinnell, Iowa, there were so many lightning bugs in the mowed grass around the house that you could walk with your hands out and catch them without even trying. I don't ever remember them being that easy to catch. They are easiest to spot in the yard, but they can also been seen above the corn and soy bean fields.
It was one of those still, not-too-hot, humid Iowa evenings where the smell of a skunk can linger on for hours. My folks keep the yard mowed, but there are plenty of ditches and a cedar tree grove attached to the perimeter of the yard. They have a variety of trees and bushes that are getting so big that it seems almost like a woods. Their house is at the top of a hill, surrounded by cornfields this year. Some years its soy beans, and unfortunately their Conservation Reserve Program ended a couple of years ago and they had to replant their CRP land with crops.
We rarely see any lightning bugs in our yard in our suburban Lakeville, Minnesota, neighborhood. However, I did spot a few one evening early in July this year. I have many fond memories of catching lightning bugs as the sun finally went down after a long summer day in small-town Iowa.
I hope one day you can get them to go back to Houston. I saw your web site in the Sunday Access magazine in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Waterloo:
June 27, 2005: Greg Price reports: While driving from Waterloo, Iowa to Cedar Rapids, Iowa - between 10:00 PM and 11:30 PM, and after a thunderstorm, I observed thousands of fireflies in the corn and soybean fields adjacent to I-380. Stopped twice at rural road exits to watch away from the highway and was amazed to see literally thousands of sparkling lights per acre of farmland. They were clustered in the grass median at the overpasses and a dozen or so were collected by my windshield and left brightly glowing smears which dimmed after about five minutes. This is my first summer in firefly country and I must say that these creatures are one of nature's treasures.