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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

We live rural southern Ontario and fireflies are usually just a single weekend or so at the end of June or beginning of July. But this year they went on for almost two months. They only just stopped about a week ago.

I'm not sure why it was a good season for them. Like you say, traffic, lighting, pesticide sprays on farms, all really the same despite COVID. Reduced air traffic I don't think would have an affect? Even after I sprayed my vineyard with insecticide to deal with japanese beetles they were fine, and continued to prosper in and around there.

It may just be that we've had an unusually hot dry year, I assume where you have as well. Maybe that's advantageous for them somehow?

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> We live rural southern Ontario and fireflies are usually just a single weekend or so at the end of June or beginning of July. But this year they went on for almost two months. They only just stopped about a week ago.

I wonder if this is cyclical behavior. We had a year like that last year down in NJ. This year it was back to maybe only a week. I live in the west part of the state surrounded by parkland. Rainfall was the only thing that was dramatically different this year. Last year was extremely wet spring and early summer (when they appeared) followed by an extremely dry end of summer into fall. This year we've had average rain in almost every month. The rain evidence isn't anecdotal, I have a state rainfall gauge a couple miles down the road from me with records going back at least a few decades.

“firefly boom”! In Michigan in 2018: https://www.michiganradio.org/post/firefly-boom-lighting-mic...

I feel that I hear people say « we’re having a unusually hot dry year » every year...

On that note I just did a Google search for "more fireflies this year" and got news articles saying as much from 2018, 2019, and 2020.

It's possible that some policy changes are working.

One of my favorite memories of cycling through the midwest in the early 90's was watching the redwing blackbird population slowly recover.

Wouldn’t have been a good memory if you were _running_ through the midwest. A good chunk of the summer, they dive-bomb anyone who looks at their bush funny. Those birds are my personal nemeses - but they’re winning.

On that note i just did a Google search for "less fireflies this year" and got news articles saying as much from 2018, 2019, and 2020...

Well, we really are in many parts of the world due to Climate Change. If it keeps getting worse, it's always unusual compared to the past...

In the upper st lawrence / great lakes basin it's really becoming more and more erratic. More ice storms, more drastic swings in the winter, lower snowfall some years, more droughts in some summers, more record rainfalls in others, etc. It's a recognizable change even in the 25 years I've lived here.

Maybe, but last year was wet and cool, this year heat wave and drought. The great lakes are still up near their record water levels though (after last year and the year before), whereas a few years ago they were at record lows.

Well, this year we for one don't, in fact we're having the exact opposite, but last year we did have a hot year and everyone said it's definitely climate change. I think we're not yet at the point where we can feel it, we're just projecting.

The personal subjective feeling at this point is fewer places having snowy winters and more frequent and severe heatwaves — the phrase “9 of the hottest years on record were in the last decade” being in the news most (or all?) years since the late 1990s.

Most individual people won’t feel the change that’s happened over their lifetime unless they’re wondering why it doesn’t snow any more or how they ever managed without air conditioning; it shows up in higher costs for national-scale-multi-year weather damage or crop and fishing productivity.

And of course, this is a global rather than local effect, so some places have more change than others. My first trip to the USA was the 2014/15 winter when there was simultaneously record cold on the Atlantic coast and record warm on the Pacific coast.

Those of us into winter sports are keenly conscious of the winter weather patterns, in a way the bulk of the population is not. Snow in southern Ontario for example has always been unreliable, with rain and snow mixes common, but snowfall is getting much much less reliable.

The last 5 years have been the hottest years on record, so...

People always complain about this being an unusually hot summer. Personally, I’m thinking of it as a summer i will look back upon as deliciously cool.

i mean, at least where I live many records about average and max temperature have been broken 3 years in a row now. I suppose if this continues it will actually start to be not unusual for this to happen.

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