Fireflies, Leuchtkaefer, 螢火蟲，ホタル

Fireflies, Leuchtkaefer, 螢火蟲，ホタル

You see here my rather futile attempt at photographing a firefly with my phone. (A kingdom for a real camera with ISO12000!) Considering how urbanized (another term for "being covered in asphalt and cement") especially Taiwan's west coast is and how Taiwanese love to rave about nature in Germany, I find it rather ironic that I only saw fireflies twice in all my years in Germany, but had them right next to where I lived three times in Taiwan.

All those three times were in Jiayi city and county. After moving into Jiayi county again and seeing I had a huge park right across the main road I had my hopes up, but only once accidentally and literally ran into two fireflies when I was crazy enough to jog through the park at night. (Crazy not because of safety issues but because there was no light.)

Then on Tuesday I came home rather late and took Nimrod to the park only to find that even the lights at the entrance were off. The surprise came when I switched off my bike's headlight: Suddenly I saw lots of tiny green LEDs in the bushes. They had been there all the time and I never noticed them due to the street lights. (Apparently they don't like to compete with other light sources.)

Also ironic: About a month ago I witnessed how crazy people in Taibei (the big city up north, also called capital) can be about fireflies. There was a special activity for those poor capitalists, where they first had to gather south of their city and then some time in the evening go some place to see fireflies.

It started to rain in the afternoon and the rain went into pouring mode before evening. Still there were probably nearly 200 people waiting when I left and the whole way to the MRT station I encountered people talking about fireflies. Crazy.

And I was right: Why wait in the pouring rain and squeeze among hundreds of people when all I need to do is walk the 400m to the main road, cross it and walk into the park? Here nobody but mosquitoes spoils the fun watching those little LEDs. Hahaha...

#Taiwan