The Search for Fireflies in New Mexico

This time of year, Anna Walker, who directs the Western Firefly Project in New Mexico, receives a few false reports. well-meaning people, mostly in Albuquerque adn other urban areas, see flashes of yellow light dancing through trees and believe thay’ve spotted a firefly. In reality, they’re seeing a laser beam from a high-tech Christmas display.

“They project light up into trees and make the lights kind of move around,” Walker told Source New Mexico. “Those fool a lot of people.”

!Anna walker’s firefly catching net leans against a camping chair in Mills Canyon on July 3, 2021.Her discovery that day meant a new state records and renewed her sense of “awe with nature again.” (Courtesy Anna Walker)

False reports are one challenge for the community science initiative searching for New Mexico fireflies. Another is convincing the public that fireflies exist here at all. Christy Bills, an entomologist at the University of Utah, started the Utah Firefly Project 11 years ago, partially in response to the “assumption that we don’t have any” fireflies in the West, she told Source NM.She and a colleague launched a project with a website soliciting firefly sightings, and received a flood of responses.

“We realized they were everywhere. They’re all over the state, and so we just kept tracking them and getting repeat confirmation about certain populations,” she said. “But the project expanded outside of Utah,becuase we were getting reports from Idaho and Wyoming and Nevada and Colorado and New Mexico.”

Bills partnered with institutions in other states to verify reports, and that’s how she met Walker, an invertebrate species survival specialist at the New Mexico BioPark Society. Walker was eager to join the effort, she said, partially because she didn’t no fireflies existed in Western states, apart from old references in museum collections.

“That’s what drew me to this firefly journey, was that such a charismatic insect could exist without most people even knowing about it, as they haven’t been studied hardly at all,” she said. “Pretty much every time you go out into the field, there’s like a discovery waiting to be found.”

Fireflies are present if you know where to look, bills and Walker insist. Since launching in New Mexico in 2021, Walker has confirmed 13 firefly occurrences from more than 100 reports.She’s also collected 27 specimens that she entered into the collection at the Museum of Southwestern Biology at the University of New Mexico.

According to the Global Biodiversity information Facility, which