As the last of the sunset’s pink hues disappeared from the sky, the Fort Collins field came to life. One flash appeared. Then another. Suddenly, the entire nature preserve seemed to sparkle with the glow of fireflies.
“I grew up in Colorado, and I didn’t even know we had fireflies here until I started working at the Butterfly Pavilion,” said Alex Han, a 25-year-old entomology technician. “Seeing them here for the first time … blew my mind.”
Han was one of a small group of researchers trekking through knee-high grass in Fort Collins on Wednesday night, searching for fireflies to capture as part of the Pavilion’s husbandry program. That program, which annually collects fireflies in the wild, is focused on learning under what conditions fireflies survive into adulthood and how to reintroduce lab-bred fireflies into the wild to help declining populations, said Francisco Garcia Bulle Bueno, the Pavilion’s director of research and conservation…