09/05/2026
Four species, all moving through the same 37 acres this fall. Some live here year-round. Some are just passing through on their way somewhere else. For a few weeks, they overlap — and the creek corridor becomes the busiest stretch of the property, if you know where to look.
This one never leaves. Mississippi’s most common butterfly, and the one most likely to land directly on you — they’re after the salt, not the flowers. Look for the blue dusting on the hindwing; that’s how you tell the females apart.
Right about now, these start moving south for the winter — and unlike most migrating butterflies, they fly low. Nine feet off the ground, easy to follow with your eyes, easy to lose track of time watching.
The one everyone already knows how to spot. Real Monarchs do pass through here, peaking in late October on their way to Mexico — though we’ll admit, the first ones we saw this year, we called Monarchs before we’d actually looked closely.
The shrub in these photos is buttonbush — Cephalanthus occidentalis — and it’s doing more work than it looks like. Most nectar plants bloom in a burst: spring wildflowers, then a gap, then goldenrod and asters in fall. Buttonbush blooms right in the middle of that gap, in the dead of summer when almost nothing else is flowering. Beekeepers have relied on it since the 1700s for exactly that reason — it’s one of the only nectar sources standing between spring and fall.
Its flowers are also built a specific way: each round cluster is made of dozens of small tubular florets, shaped for exactly the pollinators that need a strong probe to reach the nectar — long-tongued bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies. Smaller bees mostly skip it. Swallowtails, Sulphurs, and Monarchs don’t.
That’s the real reason four species converge here in the same stretch of weeks. It’s not luck, and it’s not decoration — it’s a native plant doing the specific job it evolved to do, planted on purpose along a creek corridor these species already use to move.
Here through the end of October. Come see the corridor for yourself — and see how many of the four you can pick out.
