Friday

Check in to the manor house any time after 10:o0 am

11:00 am Welcome & Introduction to Tremper Mound and the Manor House, your fellow registrants, and orientation to the weekend

11:30 am Indoor Presentation: The Natural and Cultural History of Fireflies. We will share a worldly and a local perspective of this specialized family of beetles that have mastered bioluminescence throughout the temperate world - A stunning and otherworldly tool of survival nearly unheard of in the terrestrial animal world.

1:30 pm Lunch at Tremper Manor House

2:00 pm Outdoor Hike Program at Tremper Mound: Understanding, Protecting & Promoting Firefly Habitat in The Field. Learning how to identify and define quality firefly habitats in the field, followed by a discussion on land management techniques designed to restore and protect firefly habitats.

5:00 pm Rest/Break and Dinner on Your Own. Local options for dinner in Portsmouth and West Portsmouth will be provided to registrants in advance.

9:30-11:00 pm Friday Night Firefly Watching at the Manor House & Pond Creek West. This is the first firefly watching night of the weekend, located next to the Tremper Manor House, where registrants will be first introduced to the dazzling showcase displays of 3-4 of mid-summer firefly species native to the area. We will also share some effective field techniques and methods for watching and identifying fireflies that registrants can use back at home!

Saturday

9:00 am Light Breakfast at the Manor House.

10:00 am Indoor Presentation: Learning to Identify Fireflies. Registrants will learn how to identify the many species of fireflies that unfold in seasonal progression from early-mid spring into late summer - by flash patterns, flash color, anatomy, habitat, and behavior

12:00 pm Lunch at the Manor House.

1:00 pm Afternoon Hike at Simon Woods: An Exploration of Day-Time Fireflies & Firefly Mimicry. Explore the paradox of the lanternless day-flying fireflies, as well as the many deceptive firefly impostors of the beetle world. These diminutive, yet beautiful and diverse beetles will fundamentally change your understanding of the firefly world’s complexity.

4:00 pm Rest/Break and Dinner on Your Own. Local options for dinner in Portsmouth and West Portsmouth will be provided to registrants in advance.

6:00 pm Evening Indoor Presentation: Firefly Citizen Science - Conducting Your Own Xerces Firefly Atlas Survey. Registrants will be guided through the process of putting together an official Firefly Atlas Survey through The Xerces Society, an international organization dedicated to protecting insect biodiversity. Later on at night, we will put these skills into practice and create our own group survey at a new, unstudied Arc preserve!

9:00 pm Saturday Night Firefly Watching and Surveying at… We will meet at the Tremper Manor House and caravan to ———, a newly protected Arc preserve where we will be conducting our very own group Firefly Atlas survey to be submitted to The Xerces Society database for firefly conservation work. Registrants will be credited on the survey report and receive their own copy to take home.

Sunday

9 am Breakfast at the Manor House

10 am Review of Firefly Identification, Phenology, and Natural History. Before the final presentation of the weekend, we will take some time to review everything we have covered over the course of the weekend in hopes of reinforcing the fundamentals of firefly identification and ecology.

11:30 am Firefly Identification Under the Microscope - This is a special opportunity to observe and participate with an entomologist in identifying firefly species by genitalia (Yes, you read that right!) under a microscope in the Tremper Manor House. We will be utilizing specimens collected during our survey the previous night.

1:00 pm Depart for home.