"...He looked like he had seen a ghost. I was worried that something was wrong. I complied with his request to follow him to the backyard. Just watch,” Fanslow instructed me. We stood there for about a minute in the increasing darkness of twilight. And then all at once, the meadow, the forest, and the stream began to light up with a seemingly supernatural show of the most intensely bright and astonishingly spastic flickering of fireflies that I had ever seen. I have seen blue ghosts in DuPont and the synchronous fireflies in the Great Smokies. These were different. The sight was surreal as Fanslow and I stood there in for some time, literally speechless, watching thousands of them. It was one of the most magical experiences of nature that I had witnessed. It trumped standing atop mountains with nearly endless views, and it overshadowed feeling the power of water at the base of a 100-foot waterfall. Perhaps its brilliance was that it occurred in one of the most unlikely places. I still don’t know what type of fireflies they were, nor does he. But what we do know is that they showed up for a reason. “Build it and they will come,” I told him, referring to Fanslow’s small-scale community conservation project...." read the whole story here: