They seem to be disappearing like the lightning bug.
When I was a boy both species were everywhere in Texas, but you can go a whole summer now and not see one.
I know. Lighting bugs are just no more. Don’t know when the last time I saw one. Shame.
We used to collect them in bottles at night and play with them. Flashlights. :)
It's funny you mention fireflies, I live in a highly populated area in S.E. Michigan and the one thing I miss from my childhood growing up in northern Michigan are the fireflies.
I lived outside a small town and in the summer they were everywhere in the field next to my house. I used to go out there in the evening and catch a bunch in a jar then put it on my dresser at night and lay in bed watching them flash.
Occasionally I think about the lack of those bugs where I live but it wasn't until this summer when I went back up north for my 45 year class reunion and stayed with an old buddy who lived out in the country in a house he built on 40 acres with the backside overlooking a small valley with woods in the background that I got to see them on display again.
My first night there I walked out onto the back deck hoping to see some deer as the sun was setting and sure enough, the fireflies were lighting up.......that was cool.
Here's another story, in all my many years here in Michigan I have only seen one Bluebird and that was at a local golf course maybe 20 years ago and yet Bluebirds are native to Michigan. From what I can figure, their nesting habitats have been taken over by the rat-sparrows and rat-starlings and they've been driven out.
That same weekend up north, I saw at least a half dozen Bluebirds around my friend's house and he said all the nesting boxes (maybe six) he had set up on the fence posts along his back yard had nesting pairs this summer........That was too cool!
Your horned toads are neat, as are all those little lizard guys. It's unfortunate their habitat is slowly eroding due to the ever increasing expansions of subdivisions........Had I grown up there, I would have been catching them left and right as a kid.