Tag Archives: India

2022 Events

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  • March 23 – Master Gardeners, Ohio State
  • April – In Defense of Plants Podcast: Fireflies & Plants
  • April 11– Iowa State Entomologists
  • April 19 – What Matters to Me, Tufts University Alumni
  • June 8 @ 7 pm ET, Manship Artists Residency, Gloucester Massachusetts
  • June 16 – Conservation Keynote at 2022 International Firefly Symposium, Gaia, Portugal
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  • July 22 – Firefly Conservation: Opportunities and Challenges invited speaker at Fireflies, Ecology, and Environment webinar hosted by EMPRI (Environmental Management & Policy Research Institute), Bengaluru, India
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  • October 20 – Firefly Conservation- Preserving the Jewels of the Night @ the Appalachian Mountain Club’s See the Dark Festival, Mediwisa Lodge, Greenville Maine
Only fireflies and stars light up the night in Maine’s famed 100-Mile Wilderness (photo by Dan Perlman)
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Finding Heaven – India’s Monsoon Fireflies

From Param and Shikha Singh, via The Untourists –

At the onset of the monsoons in early June, we traveled to a small village near Sangamner in rural Maharashtra. We went to Purushwadi, a tiny village 1000 m above mean sea level, based only on some promises we’d heard. During this season, this valley was said to transform into a heaven of fireflies at night. As it turned out, these promises and more  were delivered!

Our trip was arranged by Grassroutes (more info below). The journey to Purushwadi was beautiful, though at one point we had to cross a river via a narrow, rusty bridge. I was scared that our car would get scratched, but luckily it was just wide enough. In the village, Grassroutes runs small tent accommodations with clean toilets. We shared meals with a village family in their hut, and tasting the pure village food was wonderful: dal, farm fresh sabzi, (vegetable) , and rotis made of pearl millet (bajra) flour.

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photo-from-purushwani

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A Very Lonely Firefly

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Eric Carle 2From Jay, a software engineer in Bangalore:

Recently I was startled to find a lonely firefly wandering around my Bangalore apartment. My children had never seen a firefly! But I grew up in a town called Payangadi in Kerala, South India. In the 1980’s electricity was scarce and most nights we had no power. In my memory there used to be trees so brilliantly lit up with fireflies, they looked like Christmas trees. Mostly these fireflies appeared just after the rains, when the leaves were still moist. I’d sit and watch them through the window for hours.