By Jeremy Varner
As summer slowly fades and transitions into fall during September and October, most of nature is bedraggled and exhausted. It’s been so hot for so long that the flowers gave up the fight long ago and are ready to accept the withering and rest that is to come. Fortunately, while the color is fading from the plants, we have an influx in color from all the migrating butterflies. We certainly have butterflies around in spring and summer, but there are a lot more of them in September and October as they travel south.
We see lots of varieties in southeast Atlanta, including the tiger swallowtail, the cloudless sulfur, and the cabbage white. But my favorite is the gulf fritillary (Dione vanillae or sometimes Agraulis vanilla). Some folks confuse them with monarchs because they have a lot of orange. Everyone knows a monarch butterfly, but if you know a gulf fritillary, it’ll be easy to tell them apart. Monarchs look like an orange stained-glass window with very heavy black lead holding the panes together. Gulf fritillaries are like an orange blanket with a few small Oreos scattered across it. The underside of their wing has lots of white spots.
The gulf fritillary is part of the longwing family, which is so named because their wings are a lot longer (extending away from the body) than they are tall (head to tail). They start out as orange caterpillars with lots of black spikes and initially mostly live on their host plant of choice, the maypop or passionflower. After they metamorphose into their adult form, I see them on all sorts of flowers in the garden, but at the end of summer I mostly see them on my zinnias.
Like a lot of winged creatures, they travel south in the winter to southern Florida, Mexico, and Central America. A few years ago, my family was spending fall break on Cape San Blas, FL. We checked out St. Joseph State Park and the field around the marina was absolutely covered in gulf fritillaries. It seemed that every flower had an orange guest sucking down nectar and fueling up for the long trip across the Gulf of Mexico. Sprouting some wings that carry you across the Gulf to gentle weather and an open bar sounds pretty good these days.
