But they come, most of all, for the synchronous fireflies, that put on their choreographed light show for two weeks in late June in the forest around the Butlers’ Black Caddis Ranch. Visitors come to see the “Chinese lantern” fireflies that seem to float through the air by Tionesta Creek. Peggy and Ken Butler organize an annual Pennsylvania Firefly Festival here, offering an intricate, quiet and fleeting experience where science and poetry live side by side. People come from around the world for this. What they do, in a world of mass-produced experiences, is organic and natural and utterly unplugged. Of hundreds of types of fireflies, these are perhaps the most remarkable. It sweeps north as temperatures warm, up from Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains to, on this night, the thick woods of the 500,000-acre (200,000-hectare) Allegheny National Forest, 100 miles (160 kilometers) from Pittsburgh.
The display happens every year in North America as spring ebbs into summer.
But these possess the unique capability of flashing in glorious, almost otherworldly unison. This is what it’s like to walk smack into a pack of synchronous fireflies - “lightning bugs,” as many of us called them in childhood.
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