The Loneliest Firefly
Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2015 9:00 pm
The other evening, just at about O-Dark-Thirty, I took our dog out for a little walk around the front yard.
Across the street, flitting about and flashing his yellow-green girl getter was a firefly.
Think about that. It was October 6th.
I looked up and down the street. No other fireflies evident.
I have no idea why the little fellow remained in the ground, in his pupal stage, awaiting complete metamorphosis and his much anticipated coming out party until October, when all the others of his kind had done all that back in the Spring and early Summer.
He was, for all intents and purposes, the only one of his kind.
Kind of reminded me of an episode of The Twilight Zone, where Burchess Meredith emerges from a library vault to find that a nuclear holocaust has left him the only living human in evidence.
So, the Loneliest Firefly, I imagine, spent the evening and night of October 6th, flying around, sending out his luminous mating call, but no one responded. No mating, no fertilization of any female firefly's eggs, no continuation of his particular genetic make-up.
And then he died.
Kind of sad, really, like that "52 Hz whale" that swims up and down the Pacific ocean sending out his calls at 52 Hz, a frequency that cannot be heard by any other whale.
Yeah. I'm weird, I know it.
Charlie Noyes
Across the street, flitting about and flashing his yellow-green girl getter was a firefly.
Think about that. It was October 6th.
I looked up and down the street. No other fireflies evident.
I have no idea why the little fellow remained in the ground, in his pupal stage, awaiting complete metamorphosis and his much anticipated coming out party until October, when all the others of his kind had done all that back in the Spring and early Summer.
He was, for all intents and purposes, the only one of his kind.
Kind of reminded me of an episode of The Twilight Zone, where Burchess Meredith emerges from a library vault to find that a nuclear holocaust has left him the only living human in evidence.
So, the Loneliest Firefly, I imagine, spent the evening and night of October 6th, flying around, sending out his luminous mating call, but no one responded. No mating, no fertilization of any female firefly's eggs, no continuation of his particular genetic make-up.
And then he died.
Kind of sad, really, like that "52 Hz whale" that swims up and down the Pacific ocean sending out his calls at 52 Hz, a frequency that cannot be heard by any other whale.
Yeah. I'm weird, I know it.
Charlie Noyes