Guide >>About this Guide: This butterfly guide provides you with photographic images of most of the butterflies found and able to be found in Florida. It also shows some butterflies that are found out of state for purely general interest purposes. This guide can be used to enjoy butterflies and see the variety and richness of the butterflies that inhabit Florida. Florida has some of the best locations to experience butterflies, with many locations being able to offer many species and high numbers of butterflies at one time.
Hopefully this guide will help you try to identify butterflies you may have seen or photographed yourself in Florida. Butterflies can vary in appearance over their range from north to south and or east to west. This variation can make it hard for a national field guide to help you find something that looks just like you saw or photographed. It can make identification of certain species of butterflies difficult. A local guide using local photographs can help greatly. I hope it helps you to find what you saw and to enjoy the images contained in this guide.
Using the Guide: There are many levels of Menus in this Butterfly Guide, Drill-Down by clicking on the butterfly image you are interested in. Keep drilling down until you get to a ‘Gallery’ of photos of your butterfly then click again to get a full page photo. Click on the arrows at the sides to view the other full page photos. Click the top right red cross to get back to the full gallery then the “MENU” button to go back up menu levels.
About Butterflies – There are about 17,500 species of butterfly in the world. 600 of these Butterfly species can be seen in the US.
September is the high point of butterfly activity in Florida, particularly in the north and the panhandle area. Butterflies fly from March to November with some Monarchs being around and visible all through the year. June is surprisingly a quiet month partly due to a lack of nectar plants.
The panhandle of Florida has a few tropical species that manage to enjoy life this far north at the edge of their range but sometimes they do not make through a very cold winter. Typically they repopulate the north of Florida again through the summer from the safety of central Florida.
There are nocturnal butterflies, there are butterflies that don’t sip nectar, there are butterflies that have intentionally ended up looking like poisonous relatives, there are butterfly caterpillars that eat Aphids, there are butterfly caterpillars that live with ants for protection…
For more interesting Butterfly Facts Click Here
All species photographed and described in this Butterfly Guide and marked with an * have been seen and usually photographed in Florida.