Chicora resident urges Pennsylvanians to save fireflies this June
For most of his life, Jeffrey Calta has been in love with nature. But when he moved to Fairview Township, he discovered a new part of nature to love: fireflies.
“One night, my wife said, ‘Come on outside, you’ve got to see this,’” Calta said. “When I did, my yard and the surrounding area was just fireflies flashing on and off. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. So we just watched it for a good hour or two.”
From that moment on, Calta was hooked on fireflies. By 2016, Calta had joined the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, a nonprofit conservation group which holds an annual festival each June in Kellettville, Forest County.
Today, Calta serves as the president of the organization. His mission today is to promote firefly conservation, especially for the month of June, when fireflies typically begin mating.
“June is the most active month of the year for fireflies for mating,” Calta said. “They’re flashing and trying to track mates for the next generation.”
Unfortunately, light pollution caused by humans is making it more difficult for fireflies to reproduce, as they rely on the darkness of night to find mates.
“Everyone has a light. No one likes the darkness anymore,” Calta said. “And yet there are so many creatures, including fireflies, that need the dark. If you install a mercury vapor light on a telephone pole in a field where they had been mating and living before, they will disappear because they can't see each other.”
As a result, Calta and the Firefly Festival are asking Pennsylvanians to voluntarily reduce their outside lighting for the month of June, in an effort called “Lights Out for Lightning Bugs.”
“Our organization now is trying to spread the word,” Calta said. “Turn off unnecessary lights when you don’t need them.”
The Pennsylvania Firefly Festival was founded in 2011 by Ken and Peggy Butler, a couple originally from Akron, Ohio, who moved to Forest County to start a bed-and-breakfast.
One day, the B&B received an unusual series of guests — a group of entomologists who came to the area to study the synchronous firefly, which at that point was thought to be nonexistent in Pennsylvania. The synchronous firefly is so named because the mating fireflies synchronize their flashing patterns to each other.
“They sent this team of three or four actual scientists, and they spent two weeks collecting fireflies, identifying them, doing DNA analysis,” Calta said. “And they found that, yes, the synchronous firefly was real close to the property where Ken and Peggy Butler bought the house.”
Not long after, the couple capitalized on the discovery by creating the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival. In its early years, the event ballooned in popularity since it was first held in 2011.
“The first year, I think they had 200 people show up, which was still more than they thought,” Calta said. “The next year it went to 400, then it went to 800 and it peaked.”
By the time Calta came on board in 2016, the Firefly Festival evolved from a single-day event into a conservation movement. Although the festival is still around, it has been scaled back in recent years to preserve the firefly habitat.
This year’s festival is a weeklong affair, with the main events taking place June 28-29. Attendance is limited to only 50 patrons per night, and reservations are distributed through a lottery system. Children younger than 5 are not allowed to attend.
“We thought that was the fairest way to do it,” Calta said.
