COMMENTARY – Joys of a Summer Night
SOMETIMES, it’s the fragrance of freshly cut hay. Sometimes it’s bats fluttering over the fields. Sometimes it’s fireflies, or chimney swifts, or timid fawns. Sometimes it’s the unseen wood thrushes, singing from the shadows. Sometimes it’s whippoorwills whistling their names.
On summer evenings, walks down country roads just seem right. After sweaty days, the air at twilight is usually several degrees cooler — enough to restore our energy — and there is almost always something out there to see, hear, smell, or sense.
Once in a while, when very lucky, we’ll hit the jackpot. For some of us, that means being able to watch the fireflies flashing their little lanterns over the damp meadows and, at the same time, hearing the whippoorwills’ repeated calls from the woods.
Fireflies and whippoorwills: Together, they make up the essence of summer out in farm country. Finding either makes an evening a success; finding both on the same walk makes us want to linger, makes us want the evening itself to linger. Even the mosquitoes seem less pesky when the whippoorwills are calling and the fireflies are sending their silent messages.
It is an indictment of our times, of course, that it’s now necessary to go looking for fireflies. Not that long ago, many people could see fireflies in their own yards. Back then, when we called them lightning bugs, the bizarre little beetles danced over gardens and lawns. Kids spent summer evenings running after the flashing lights, trying to capture them in jars, while adults watched from the porch. Now, that scenario can seem archaic, even though in many places it wasn’t more than a generation ago.
As with most decreases, the reasons for the fireflies’ problems are many, but a chief culprit is pesticide, and our insistence on poisoning everything that we deem annoying. We spread chemicals on our grass to get rid of grubs and other “bugs,” and we fog the air to eliminate mosquitoes. Eventually, we make yards almost uninhabitable for anything. Except, of course, the mosquitoes we’ve set out to destroy. They’re still around, aren’t they?
So now, to see fireflies, we have to go looking, often out beyond the suburbs, to the farms and pastures and hayfields and meadows. If we go before sunset, we can enjoy the evening activities of the birds that, like us, have spent the midday hours trying to avoid the heat and conserve energy. Now, the busy little wrens are working along the stone walls, the barn swallows are swooping over the fields, the chimney swifts are seining the air higher up, and the irrepres-sible catbirds and mockingbirds are telling their tales from the brush.
Occasionally, we’ll see bats over the fields, too. Bats lack the grace of swallows and swifts, usually fluttering so erratically that their flight patterns alone distinguish them from birds. But just seeing bats should remind us that there are — or were — other solutions to mosquitoes than poisons. The number of mosquitoes that can be consumed every evening by bats, swallows, swifts and other wild creatures is probably beyond our comprehension. They could do the whole job, if they had the chance.
If we walk by a small pond or marsh, the dominant sound will be that of frogs, led by the deep-voiced bullfrogs. On some nights, the commotion will include green frogs, pickerel frogs, chorus frogs, and maybe gray tree frogs. Together, they can drown out all other sounds. It can be fun to try picking out each type of frog call, but there are other sounds of the evening worth listening to, as well.
The wood thrush is one. In summer, many other birds give up singing, but not the wood thrush. Its song is clear and strong, melodic but unhurried — just right for summer. Wood thrushes seem to prefer twilight for singing, and often country-road walkers are entertained by the thrushes while awaiting darkness and fireflies. Even if fireflies, and bats, and whippoorwills, are not found, no evening spent listening to a wood-thrush serenade can be too disappointing.
When darkness arrives, and if we’ve chosen our destination well, the fireflies will appear. Scientists can explain how these insects create their lights, and to an extent why, but out there, explanations seem cold and unnecessary. There is magic in the fireflies, plain and simple. They blink and flash, first over a bush, then low in the grass, then right in front of our face. Here and gone, and back again.
We watch and marvel and realize how much we miss having them in our own yards. And we wonder how many of today’s children have never chased fireflies.
On ideal nights, a whistle from the darkened forest will interrupt our concentration on the fireflies. A whippoorwill starts calling, and invariably others will answer, maybe three or four of them. We’re not likely to see any of the whippoorwills — they’re dark birds, perched in deep shadows — but seeing them is no more necessary than understanding fireflies. The calls are enough. They say that the summer night has not changed all that much. We just have to go farther to find it.
Ken Weber, whose column appears here weekly, writes books on nature and outdoor recreation. He can be reached by e-mail at kweber@projo.com.