When I walked out of the shop last night there were some spring peepers hiding in the grass right next to my truck, doing a techno fade-in dubstep version of their mating song. The audio recording capability of an iPhone is impressive, too!
Every year I tell myself that I’m going to try to capture the fireflies, which put on an amazing show in my back yard. Maybe this year there won’t be any. We’re getting to the point of collapse where I expect whole populations of seasonal creatures to simply not appear. Remind me in June and I’ll start thinking how to time exposures.
My cat gives the recording two pricked ears up.
That brings back memories. My grandparents lived in Ohio and there are spring peepers and fireflies there too. Or at least, there were.
Lovin’ the polyrhythms!
Fireflies spend up to two years in larval form before emerging in their brief (week or two) blinky glory.
If you have a hard drought, expect a firefly deficit for at least the next two years after your rains return.
If you set this soundtrack to footage of fireflies, I would just die of environmental nostalgia. Yes, I know the two don’t tend to occur simultaneously, but they’re two seasonal signs that don’t occur here at all, and I miss them.
I’m going to go listen to this again.
@kestrel
I live in Ohio and we still have them aplenty, although a number of people here (and elsewhere I suppose) think the sound is coming from crickets. I can usually spot one on my back glass door a few times a year. People here also seem to think that a dove is an owl when they hear one. Weird.
Thanks, Marcus. That was a fun bit of nostalgia. We had spring peepers where I grew up and I haven’t heard them in years.
Owls? I grew up (in OH) knowing dove calls as “rain crows.” That’s what my dad called them, and I only ever seemed to hear them after a good rain, so it made sense (and what a beautifully melancholy sound it was in the acoustics of the damp air across hay fields and woodlands, and that eldritch, post-rain lighting!). It was probably well into adulthood before I learned those were doves (n.b., some regions identify cuckoos and rain crows).
Ironically, the folklore around rain crows is that they call before a rain, but I only ever heard them after one.
grrr – cuckoos as rain crows