OH, FUCK ME DEAD! On the way home from today’s walk I saw easily 800 fireflies! Yes, over eight hundred! That was absolutely amazing. First time this year and already this many. Crazy! They were just fricking everywhere in the entire forest. I counted to one hundred and then stopped. The darker it got, the more fireflies came out and glowed around. :-) There were spots where in under ten seconds I counted 20 glowworms. Super sick. Soooo beautiful. <3

Before I left I tried to call a mate to join me, who apparently wasn’t home yet, though, didn’t pick up. But in the very end I surprisingly met her in the forest and we were super happy to encounter all the fireflies. She also said that today was her first time this year to spot them. I’ll definitely check them out in the next days, too.

Apart from all the glowworms, I also came across some goats, two deer (one of which only the ears showing out of the grass), according to the sounds I sadly must have scared up four more, bucketloads of tadpoles, four big and very active anthills next to each other and three bats to finish the stroll off. I call that extremely successful.

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There ya go: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-06-24/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I can confidently say that I don’t remember ever having seen fireflys. (Nor Firefly.) 😳 I’m most surprised that you could count them. Naively, I would assume that these guys move around a lot and you’d lose track of them?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, really!? You should come visit. :-)

As far as I know females are sitting in the shrubs and males fly around, but they’re not all that quick. They are slowly moving glowing dots that you can easily follow with your eyes. The bigger problem might be that they turn off and then on again. So, one could count duplicates. However, there’s typically a bit of distance between them (at least 30-50 cm I’d say, often more). Counting the same individual multiple times is not all that common (assuming that they don’t speed up when turned off). My counting was also conservative I believe.

Ah, Die Maus also covered them a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVGD5QEvtoc At the end, there’s a video were you can see the speeds a bit.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That short segment is fairly close to reality, even though it obviously looks heaps better in person: https://youtu.be/u8YVorNRcDM?t=66

Hahaha, I’m sure there were well over one thousand fireflies today! Basically at all times I could watch at least 15 of them around me. At better spots where one could see a few meters into the forest, there were easily 30 individuals, probably more. One even landed on my small finger. I didn’t feel anything at all, but my finger glowed. :-) Awwww! After a 20 meters ride it took off.

But it looks like I have to go already at 21:30 at sunset the next days. Today, I left the house at 22:00 and all the above happend in the first half. The second half of the walk was rather boring, maybe just around 70 glowworms in total. The extremely busy route yesterday was virtually dead this time I came around. They all have already gone to sleep, or something like that.

I also encountered two toads. I nearly stepped on the first one, but it luckily jumped to the side in time. No animals harmed.