Earlier I posted the Gulf Fritillary caterpillar story. If we had any caterpillars here, and we must somewhere, I hadn’t seen any. But Glenn found a bunch of them on passionflowers (Passiflora incarnata) on campus and brought them home to our own wild passionflowers. Even at that time I’d seen an adult fritillarying about but had not been able to photograph it. They’re way shy compared to the swallowtails and admirals which will perch on your fingers.

With the new camera though I was able to zoom in from ten or twenty feet away. I know that in some places these guys are common as hell all year around but I swear I think we only have the one lone fellow here. Maybe next year we’ll have more!


Such an amazingly brilliant orange color! It almost makes me want to abandom my favoritism toward primary reds and blues. This one’s enjoying a sip from Mexican Sunflower, Tithonia rotundifolia, which is turning out to be our major workhorse plant as a nectar source for just about all the butterflies I see.

Gulf Fritillaries (Agraulis vanillae) are heliconian butterflies, mostly tropical so this may be the only species that finds itself this far north, and extends to a line between Kansas and North Carolina. Apparently the adults will migrate southward for the winter, according to the USGS Georgia Butterflies Webpage.