Butterflies bring beauty to Emerald Coast

For folks looking for a bit of color in their lives, fall along the Emerald Coast is the perfect time to go butterfly watching.

A handful of species migrate through the Florida Panhandle during the late summer and early fall months. They frequent open fields and roadside areas filled with flowers, as well as some coastal areas.

"If you're in the right location, you're almost guaranteed to see a good range of butterflies," said Larry Williams, a local extension agent for the University of Florida. "Some are more showy than others."

The monarch, gulf fritillary, cloudless sulphur, common buckeye and long-tailed skipper are among the butterflies that pass through the Panhandle, according to Jaret Daniels at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Daniels, who is the assistant director for research at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera Biodiversity at the Florida Museum of Natural History, said the butterflies are in the Panhandle fueling up to migrate south.

The monarchs are heading for Caribbean destinations, while the other butterflies will likely winter in South Florida.

"Most of them are moving through and they're stopping to fuel up to power their southward flight," he said. "There will be hundreds of thousands of them moving through."

The monarch and the gulf fritillary are orange and black, with the monarch being the larger of the two.

The cloudless sulphur is a large lemon-green butterfly, while common buckeye is a small to medium sized brown butterfly, with large colorful target-shaped marks on its wings.

The long-tailed skipper is about the same size as the common buckeye. Daniels described it as "very nondescript" with long tails and a greenish iridescence on the wings.

"Anywhere from the latter part of July through the month of October would be perfect conditions to go out looking for butterflies," Williams said.