Fireflies and photos



I saw fireflies for the first time last night. In late spring they can be found near very clean, fresh streams, usually in the mountains. I went with a teacher I work with to a small town about an hour away that has a river famous for fireflies. The old people out with their grandchildren said there were many more back when they were kids, but there were still hundreds if not thousands of yellowish-blue lights bobbing up and down along the river and over the newly planted rice fields. The light of the firefly is not constant, but pulsing, about one second on, one second off. The coolest thing is that the pulsing is almost entirely in unison. Their strobing outlines the path of the river like a crooked, floating airport runway at night. I managed to catch one and look at it for a while in my hands. The light comes from a small round area at the end of its body that actually looked a lot like a small light bulb.

In other news, I just got a new photo album up on my home page of Kumano, the large peninsula south of Osaka where my town is located.

Posted: Sat - June 11, 2005 at 11:26 AM        

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