‘Night Magic’ invites you to celebrate the living wonders of the dark

Night Magic
Leigh Ann Henion
Algonquin Books, $30

I feel like I’ve been out all night. In my mind, I’ve been walking the mountains and meadows of the Appalachian region after dark. I’ve encountered spotted salamanders, synchronous and blue ghost fireflies, glowworms and different kinds of moths and bats. My guide has been Leigh Ann Henion, who seeks to revive night to its rightful place as a wonderland of nature and renewal in her most up-to-date book, Night Magic.

Henion pursues midnight journeys as a balm, having a look for respite from the near-constant illumination owing to artificial light. She wonders, what’s life like within the dark? “Darkness is often presented as a void of doom as opposed to a force of nature that nourishes lives, including our own,” Henion writes. “This should be the story of how I got down to re-center darkness by spending time with a whole lot of the diverse and awe-inspiring life-forms which can well be nurtured by it.”

Henion — an author who writes in regards to the natural world, go from side to side and other themes — takes readers to Tennessee, Ohio, Alabama and her home state of North Carolina. Within the corporate of friends, her son, scientists and other night-curious strangers, she seeks the fauna, flora and fungi that thrive in darkness, infrequently having a look in her own backyard.

The book moves through spring, summer and fall, each season specializing in some different life-forms. Within the spring, to demonstrate, she witnesses spotted salamanders, which are living tons of their lives in darkness. These black or dark-brown amphibians with cheery, yellow-orange spots spend most of their time less than ground. The salamanders in brief emerge in the head of spring nights to breed in ephemeral pools, areas fed by rain that dry out periodically.

Henion’s night excursions continue with appearances from glowworms, which can well be luminous fly larvae that shine blue; colorful moths, major pollinators which can well be experiencing troubling population declines; and foxfire, the catchall term for bioluminescent fungi glowing on woodland floors. Jumbled together among these encounters, Henion laments the ever-growing theft of natural darkness by artificial light in her mountain neighborhood and around the sphere (SN: 1/19/23). “At this point in history,” she writes, “a full 0.33 of human beings on this planet can now not see the Milky Way from where they're living.”

Henion encourages readers to tune in to the darkness around them. This could likely require persistence because it should take the eyes numerous hours to alter into adapted to low light. And he or she unpacks the fears people — including herself — can have about darkness and the animals associated with it.

As an example, when Henion gets the chance to lend a hand survey bat populations in Alabama, she recounts feeling unnerved by an detect with a bat that dove at her. A student of some of the bat researchers on the event reassured Henion that the bat wasn’t ambushing her: “You’ve got to remember of, bats are better fliers than Tom Cruise in Top Gun.” The bat end up to be just having dinner — the bugs around Henion’s head, that have been attracted to the carbon dioxide she exhaled.

Like bats, moths is likely to be unfairly maligned partly for their connection to night, Henion writes. It’s thought that moths orient themselves with lend a hand from the constant angle of the moon and are flummoxed by artificial lights that bombard them from all directions (SN: 1/30/24). As a moth enthusiast tells Henion, “in that state of man-made-light disorientation, it feels like a moth’s attacking us,” when as a substitute, the creature doesn’t know where to fly.

Though Henion refers to emerging research about artificial light’s effects on human health, I revealed myself wishing for more small print. As an example, she writes within the preface that light pollution “has been shown to set off increased rates” of certain health conditions. But the research she cites within the bibliography describes associations between artificial light and different health harms. Association does now not mean causation. Excessive light exposure after it becomes dark does appear to be a health risk, but I used to be left wondering how big of a risk and where the science currently stands.

That criticism doesn’t detract from the book’s enthusiastic and meaningful argument to take care of natural darkness and the ecosystems that rely on it, for the sake of the creatures, the flowers and ourselves. Henion closes with what feels like a blessing and a call to action: “May we to locate our way back to natural darkness, or not lower than hold fast to the barren region that also exists, so that we’ll have the option to bear witness to night’s living riches.”

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