Wild Times

Field Notes III.XXIV: A glimpse at life in June

Welcome to Field Notes!

As the calendar slides into June the season has become a story of rain. It is a wetter year than any in recent memory, but maybe that’s just my perception of it. The South is heating up with the arrival of summertime, but we are in an almost daily cycle of building clouds and crashing storms. The earth is sodden and the air thick. Moisture clings to the skin whenever we step outdoors, but the green vegetation enfolding the land is verdant, clean, and fresh.

I enjoy the rain for what it delivers. It is greatly preferable to the all to frequent seasons of drought in recent years.

Fireflies have arrived. I let the dogs out one last time before bed and see them blinking in the darkness of the yard under trees out by the shed. Lately when I see them I think of other photographer’s magical images of glowing trails of synchronous fireflies in the Smokies. Some are even haunting captures of the Blue Ghost fireflies.

Shouldn’t I be able to capture similar photos of the fireflies in my yard? Maybe. I’ve just never tried to learn how to go about it, and those fireflies are out past my bedtime.

The wife and I had a short getaway to an Air B&B in Asheville, NC. We got tickets to see a live show with Josh Gates, the host of some fun television shows we enjoy. Asheville is only about 3 hours from home, but we decided to make a weekend of it.

I would have loved to explore and photograph the Blue Ridge Parkway, but much of it was still closed from hurricane damage north of Asheville. The Honey Festival and Folk Art Center were interesting, though!

The Air B&B was very nice and gave us some unbelievable cinnamon rolls. ‘Cozy’ is a very suitable description, and it was situated amid green rolling hills.

A strange humming in the distance caught my attention. It was almost mechanical, but not quite. A large bug flew, dipping and diving, across the lawn. I reached up. It landed in my hand at the same time as I moved to catch it. A cicada. This one doesn’t look like the cicadas back home, though. Its a bit smaller and black, not green. Not long after that is when I noticed all of the cicada husks strewn across the ground. I had to look up this phenomenon. It was the Periodical Cicada Brood XIV, which emerges in Western North Carolina every 17 years. That was the noise in the hills that I was hearing. Wild!

The Air B&B had a few alpacas and chickens on the property. I love alpacas and peeked in on them often, but these guys were pretty shy and mostly stayed in their shed.

I thought this would be a good spot to photograph fireflies. A lawn in the country with mountains nearby, surely I could get a nice long exposure of fireflies here. Well, steady rain at night washed out that idea.

Now I am back home with the rest of June sprawling ahead of me. It’s wildflower season, so I have a couple of short trips to the Smokies coming up. Planning these things comes with great difficulty. Although I’m only three hours south of the Smokies, the elevation difference between the mountains and here makes a huge difference. Wildflower season hear came and went weeks ago.

It’s time to let my dogs out again and those fireflies are back in the yard, ephemeral yellow tails glinting in the dark. This time I try to make an image. Long exposures. Multiple long exposures. I can stack the images later on to give an amplified impression of those glowing bugs.

The photos turn out to be a noisy mess that doesn’t capture the fireflies at all. Clearly I have a lot to learn.

Apparently June is riot season, as well. I’ve watched the clips and images from Los Angeles. Now the ‘No Kings’ protests are set to pop up across the country on Saturday. It is a vivid reminder of June 2020.

I know some who plan to attend these protests. I am all in favor of people demonstrating and voicing their opinions. Hopefully good people can go there, be seen, and can speak their minds. My fear is that a few bad actors may try to turn this towards destruction or violence.

I don’t like crowds. This is not within the mission scope of my unit and I’m not trained to deal with crowds. Still, when things go sideways and the desperate cry out for help, what do you do? You go help, to the extent that you can. Things went sideways back in 2020 and there is potential for a similar story five years later.

Me and the boys in June 2020

Of course, I am writing this on Friday and by the time you are reading it on Sunday morning or later it will have all played out, one way or another. Hopefully it will have been a lot of preparation for the worst that didn’t come about.

More importantly, it is also firefly season in the Smokies. The wildflowers are my goal, but I won’t pass up a chance to photograph those luminous insects in the crepuscular forest. I’ve never been so excited for late June, despite just receiving a bear warning for the back country campsite I will be staying at.

Rain, 17 year cicada broods, potential riots, and fireflies. We are living through some wild times!

I hope you all are having an interesting June, as well! This post was mostly an update that I made on the fly. I spent a huge amount of time updating my photography galleries this week and did not have time for much else. I broke it up into many more galleries that are now arranged by location and each photo has a caption with general info about where and when it was taken. Hopefully this will give viewers more context to the photos and make them a bit more meaningful. Please give it a look and let me know what you think-

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