The rotating hours of blackness that shroud the blue planet have been described as the ‘Queen of Darkness’. In the foothill jungles of the Shivaliks, the night is a display of the lives of creatures that dread daylight. By casting away the ingrained human fears of darkness, an odyssey into the jungles and waterbodies affords one a spectacle from the ‘other side of planetary paradise’.
It is not difficult to imagine fireflies (jugnoos) indulging in a pulsating dance over placid waters lit by moonlight and stars. But what about a pair of long-tailed nightjars indulging in manoeuvres over water in perfect unison, like the show of the IAF’s Suryakiran Aerobatic Team. The nightjars pluck insects rising from the placid, mossy surface. Their eyes shine a pinkish-red, like tracers on a black canvas.
Then, take Sambars moving along hillock contours. Their eye pairs are reminiscent of twinkling lights of distant Gulmarg cottages. The difference being that the lights move in darts and spurts, attended by alarm calls and bellows. It is while standing in the heart of the wilderness that the ‘illusion of stillness’ of earth and blinking, ‘stationary’ stars is dispelled. For if all was still and unmoving, then to where did the stars and moon sail away at dawn?
And then, to a little wonder, a ‘mitti da dalla/dehla’ in its merging with mother earth, a true son of the soil. It is a toad, whose length could be safely described as longer than the diameter of a ₹10 coin. It cautiously slinks across the dry rivulet, like a soldier embracing earth to assault an enemy bunker. The toad’s eyes are blacker than the ‘Queen of Darkness’. They do not shine.
Loving fireflies to death
Humans can virtually hunt a species to death, as also by an indulgence in its contrary instinct. This Janus-faced, unbridled destruction is independent of the usual culprits of pollution, habitat attrition, pesticides, etc.
There were 40,000 tigers estimated in India at the turn of the 20th century but excessive shikar contributed to bringing numbers down drastically. The passenger pigeon, endemic to North America, was estimated at 3-5 billion in numbers when America was discovered. But European settlers had shot it out of the skies, i.e. extinction, by the turn of the 19th century. Or, the partridge holocausts of Punjab and Bharatpur duck shoots when hundreds were flushed and shotgunned in a day’s shikar.
Conversely, there can be few stories more steeped in irony and unthoughtful love than the fireflies of Moriyama (Japan). Moriyama town was once famed for its particularly luminous Genji fireflies (Luciola cruciata). Set amid Lake Biwa and the Suzuka mountains, Moriyama nights were spangled by thousands and thousands of brilliant spots of golden light.
The Japanese are known for their love for the natural world, in particular for fireflies — those blossoms of a summer night. But that unrequited love was not attended by a concomitant circumspection. They simply collected Moriyama fireflies (each commercial collector could trap 3,000 of these glow beetles in a night) during the Meiji period (1868-1912).
“Moriyama’s fireflies were conscripted to decorate hotels, restaurants and private gardens so that city dwellers could marvel at their radiant beauty. Each summer, the town also collected and offered their famous insects as gifts to honor Emperor Meiji,” wrote US Prof Sara Lewis, author of the acclaimed book, ‘Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies’.
Nature’s abundance has no counter to human greed. By 1920, a proverbial room brimming with candles as Lewis put it, was ebbing into darkness one by one. Only a few hundred fireflies are left in Moriyama.
Moriyama holds a lesson across time, culture and space. In China, fireflies are being caught in great numbers to cater to the popular Qixi culture. In India, illegal netting of rare butterflies for private collections abroad poses a similar threat.
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