cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11787771
[alt text: Text that says, “People [say] 'I never see butterflies or lightning bugs in my yard. Their yard: (colon)”. Below the text is a photo of a birds-eye view of a large house with an equally large yard. The lawn is covered in standard turfgrass (probably Kentucky bluegrass) that has been recently mowed.]
Create habitat for lightning bug larvae. Set aside parts of your yard to go undisturbed, leave the leaf litter there year-round, leave a couple logs out to rot, plant a few woody perennials there to provide some shade and retain moisture. You can do this and still also retain some lawn, if you want to.
Turn off the lights outside your house. You don’t need that floodlight on all night. Get a motion sensor if it’s important enough to you. The artificial light disrupts their mating cycle, meaning the next generation in your yard will be smaller or non-existent. Reducing outdoor lighting also helps migrating birds find their way more effectively and allows you to see more stars.
Never use pesticides, ever. Also tell your neighbors about how yard treatments intended to kill mosquitoes are much more effective at killing lightning bugs and bees than mosquitoes. The company selling you a mosquito treatment will straight-up lie to you about this.
…I wondered why I still had fireflies around, the answer is being lazy with leaves? My laziness is paying off! I love seeing the little fireflies! We also have a lot of trees here so that helps more!
Yup! They live for 1-2 years as larvae in the ground, and they require moisture to survive. Keeping the leaves down and undisturbed raises the moisture level of the dirt underneath and provides habitat for all sorts of things the larvae will eat. You’ll also find the number of lighting bugs you’ve got in your yard varies with how much moisture your yard had the previous two years. You can have a bumper crop of adults in a drought year, but two years later could have a rainy year with very few
After all, nature is evolved around being undisturbed, there are no people taking leaves out in the wild after all
Human actions are an unnatural influence, so unless those actions are in deliberate aid to nature, it makes sense that it’s going to disturb the natural order of things more than anything else
I would love option 2, but one of my neighbors has to have his light on all damned night, and there’s a business not far from me that has massive floodlights on all night, so I never need to use a light when I go outside at night :/