Welcome!

Enter The Firefly Forest

The Firefly Forest is my nature blog and features photographs and information about a wide variety of wild animals and plants (including fireflies of course). Most of my photos were taken in the beautiful mountains, deserts, and grasslands of southern Arizona because I lived there for many years in Tucson, Arizona. My Tucson house was in a rural area near the Saguaro National Park East, so I observed and photographed a lot of wildlife in my very own yard. Tucson is within the Sonoran Desert, which has an unusually large diversity of plant and animal life because of its varied topography and dual summer and winter rainy seasons, so there was aways something new and interesting to photograph. If you are interested in Arizona's plants, check out my website Southeastern Arizona Wildflowers and Plants.

I also travelled twice to the wonderful country of Costa Rica and photographed some of its many plants and animals. Costa Rica is a nature photographer's paradise, and I really wish that I could have spent much more time there.

I now live near the coast in Pahoa, Hawaii on the Big Island (a.k.a. Hawaii Island). The Big Island is the largest, easternmost, and southernmost island in the Hawaiian island chain, and it is home to the very active Kilauea Volcano. Pahoa is on the rainy windward side of the island, so except for papaya fields and recent lave flows, the vegetation is dense lowland jungle. Because of Hawaii's isolation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, species diversity here is not as great as in Arizona or Costa Rica, but Hawaii does have many native birds and plants that are found nowhere else in the world. Be sure to visit my website Hawaiian Plants and Tropical Flowers to see some of Hawaii's many beautiful and interesting native and introduced plants.

~ T. Beth Kinsey ~