How to Run a Firefly Walk

Anyone can run one. We cannot run them for you, because this site is built by one person around a day job. But everything the walk produces has a home here, free, for ever, and openly licensed so the community that gathered it keeps it.

First, do no harm

A firefly walk done carelessly is worse than no walk at all. Fireflies flash to find a mate, and a white torch sweeping across a display drowns out every signal in range. For as long as the light is on, the insects you came to see cannot do the one thing their short adult lives are for. Everything below follows from that.

• Red light only. Cover a torch with red cellophane, or use a head torch with a red mode. Red is far less disruptive to fireflies and preserves your own night vision, so you will see more.
• Turn phone screens away, or dim them fully. A phone at full brightness is a floodlight in a dark field.
• Stay on paths, and stay back from the water's edge. Larvae spend a year or more in damp ground before they ever glow; a trampled bank kills next year's display, not this one.
• Do not catch them, and do not put them in a jar. It is the picture everyone remembers from childhood, and it is a night of that insect's few remaining ones.
• Keep groups small and voices low. Twenty people quietly is a better count than fifty people talking.
• Ask permission first if the site is private, protected, or somebody's farm. A firefly walk that annoys a landowner closes the site for everyone after you.

When to go

Fireflies are seasonal and weather-dependent, and both vary by place. That is exactly why this site publishes a month-by-month chart for every place that has enough records to draw one. Look up your nearest place page before choosing a date; if there is no page yet, that is a reason to go, not a reason not to.

• Arrive before dusk while you can still see the ground, and let your eyes adapt for at least fifteen minutes.
• The first hour after full dark is usually the best. Many species have a short, sharp display window rather than glowing all night.
• Warm, still, humid nights are better than cool or windy ones. Rain during the day is often a good sign; heavy rain that evening is not.
• Avoid a bright moon if you can choose. A full moon washes out a weak display the way a torch does.
• If you find nothing, write that down too. A night with no fireflies at a place that used to have them is a real and useful record.

What to record

The whole value of a walk is that somebody wrote it down. One person's memory of a good display is an anecdote; fifty dated, located records are something a local government can be shown when a road or a floodlight is proposed.

Fill in the sheet below on paper as you go, because phones are a light source and a distraction, then type it into the map afterwards. The sheet's fields are the same fields the site asks for, so this takes minutes.

• Count in bands, never exactly. “A handful”, “dozens”, “hundreds”. Nobody can count a display accurately and a made-up precise number is worse than an honest range.
• Watch ONE insect for thirty seconds and describe what its light did. A steady glow, a single flash then a pause, quick repeated flashes, or many flashing together in unison. The rhythm is the single most useful clue to what it is.
• Note the colour honestly: warm yellow, green, or a cold blue-white. Colour is genuinely hard to judge in the dark, so guessing helps nobody.
• Do not guess the species. “A firefly” is a complete and honest record; a wrong scientific name is worse than no name, because everyone downstream believes it.
• Record the habitat: mangrove, riverbank, rice paddy, forest, garden. It matters more for identification than most people expect.

Invite me, and I will come when I can

If your group organises a walk, I would genuinely love to hear about it, and if I can get there, I will. I built this site because my son did a school report on fireflies and I realised my own children had never seen a real display, so being at one with people seeing their first is the whole point as far as I am concerned.

I should be straight with you: I do this in evenings and at weekends around a full-time job, so I cannot promise to be anywhere on a particular date, and I would rather say that now than let you down later. Invite me anyway. Tell me where and when through the contact page, and if I am free I will be there, and if I am not, everything you record still has a home here.

Afterwards

Type the records in at alitaptap.org. No account is needed, and each one goes into a queue a person reviews before it appears on the map. Once a place has enough dated records it gets a page of its own, showing what has been seen there, which species, and the months people have actually found them.

That page is the thing you can hand to somebody. It is the difference between saying “there are fireflies there” and showing a record with dates against it, and it is the reason the walk is worth writing down rather than just enjoying.

Everything gathered is published under a Creative Commons licence and can be downloaded in full by anyone, including you. The records belong to the community that made them; this site is just where they live.

Make it an event, and invite us

The easiest way to get people there is a Facebook event: pick a date, name the meeting point, and share it. Invite our page and we will share it too, so anyone nearby who follows fireflies sees it. And if the date suits, one of us may come along. No promises, because this is built around a day job, but the invitation is genuinely welcome.

Invite us on Facebook