One of the highlights of our summer vacation this year was watching my kids see fireflies for the first time. Â We spent a week touring historic sites in Wyoming, Nebraska, Illinois and Missouri. While we were in Nauvoo, Illinois we spent a couple of pleasant evenings watching the sun set over the Mississippi River while the kids ran around the grassy hill chasing the occasional firefly that drifted into their reach. A few were even captured, named and released back into the air.
On the way home through Missouri my oldest daughter wanted to visit a historic site at Haun’s Mill that she had read about.  The site is well off the beaten track on a lonely country road in Caldwell County. The only hint that you’ve actually arrived at the correct place is an old broken stone marker.  Our drive from Illinois took longer that day than we had planned, and we arrived just as it was getting dark. As we drove down the narrow gravel road we began to see the occasional firefly flitting through the roadside weeds. The sun was setting when we finally found the weathered historic marker.  The site is on a bend of Shoal Creek, which is densely wooded. When we pulled up it was quite dark and quiet.
In the darkness it was difficult to see much. We walked around with flashlights for a few minutes in hopes of seeing something of the area. Seemingly all of a sudden fireflies appeared all around us.  It was one of the most magical things I’ve ever seen. There must have been thousands of them, randomly moving and blinking like no artificial light show I’ve experienced.  The darkness of the tree line was a perfect backdrop.  For a few precious minutes we had a spectacular 360-degree light show.
I grabbed my camera and tried numerous exposure combinations trying to capture something of the scene. I’d never given any thought to how I might capture such an image, so I just tried combinations that I thought might work. This single image is the only one that really turned out, and like most nature photos, comes nowhere close to what we saw that night. Perhaps it isn’t that cool for people that live in Missouri, but it was a magical moment for us.
