Florida Nature Guide: September 2026
September is peak fall migration and the height of hurricane season in Florida — songbirds and raptors stream south, shorebirds crowd the flats, and the first monarchs funnel down the Gulf coast. The fall vegetable garden takes off as the worst heat eases, blazing star colors the flatwoods, and the autumn sky returns under still-warm nights.
What to look for this week
- The Christmas Bird Count season peaks across Florida, with Merritt Island and the Everglades tallying huge numbers of wintering ducks, spoonbills, and wood storks.
- The Quadrantid meteor shower peaks in a brief, sharp burst around January 3 — best after midnight from the dark Kissimmee Prairie or Big Cypress.
- The cool-season vegetable garden is in full production statewide; harvest broccoli, collards, and lettuce, and keep frost cloth ready in the north.
Birds This Month
September is the peak of fall songbird migration in Florida and one of the busiest birding months of the year. The coastal hammocks and migrant traps — Fort De Soto, the Keys, Honeymoon Island, and the Panhandle barrier islands — fill with southbound American Redstarts, Northern Parulas, Black-and-white, Prairie, Cape May, Magnolia, and Blackpoll Warblers, Veeries, Red-eyed Vireos, tanagers, grosbeaks, orioles, and buntings. Raptor migration builds, with Broad-winged Hawks, Ospreys, American Kestrels, Peregrine Falcons, and Merlins streaming down the peninsula and concentrating at the Florida Keys Hawkwatch on Curry Hammock, where thousands of Peregrines pass in fall.
Shorebirds crowd the flats — sandpipers, plovers, dowitchers, yellowlegs, and godwits — at Merritt Island NWR, Fort De Soto, and the Gulf-coast mudflats, and the first wintering ducks begin to appear. The fall monarch butterfly migration and the songbird flights both funnel toward the St. Marks NWR Panhandle coast. The summer breeders are mostly departing, the last Swallow-tailed Kites have gone, and resident Florida Scrub-Jays, Limpkins, and Northern Mockingbirds, the state bird, hold their territories through the warm, stormy month.
What's Blooming
September opens Florida's spectacular fall wildflower season. Blazing star (Liatris) sends up its tall rose-purple wands across the flatwoods, scrub, and dry prairies, often most spectacular where summer rains and prescribed fire have prepared the ground. The roadsides and wet prairies wash yellow with tickseed sunflower, goldenrod, narrowleaf sunflower, goldenaster, and the white drifts of frostweed and climbing aster.
The marsh edges and ditches still hold the wet-season bloom — string-lily, pickerelweed, alligator flag, and the white water lily — and the wet flatwoods raise the showy pine lily (Catesby's lily) and the carnivorous sundews and pitcher plants of the Panhandle bogs. The native beautyberry is heavy with bright purple fruit, and the elderberry blooms and fruits in the wet ditches. South Florida's hammocks and dunes keep their tropical bloom going with firebush, beach sunflower, railroad vine, and scorpionstail. Gardens stay full with pentas, salvia, firebush, porterweed, zinnia, gaillardia, and the first fall mistflower drawing the migrating monarchs.
Garden This Month
September launches Florida's fall vegetable garden as the worst summer heat eases and the rains begin to taper — one of the two best planting windows of the year. Across the state, transplant tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant (the fall tomato crop set now will fruit in the cool, dry weather of October and November), and direct-sow squash, cucumbers, beans, pumpkins, and sweet corn. The heat-tolerant summer crops — okra, southern peas, sweet potatoes — finish their season.
This is also the start of the long cool-season garden. Begin sowing and transplanting the cool-weather crops — broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, kale, lettuce, carrots, beets, radishes, and the first strawberry plants in central Florida — that will carry the productive fall and winter. Protect new transplants from the lingering heat and the September storms with light shade cloth, and stay vigilant for the fungal diseases and caterpillars that thrive in the warm humidity. Hurricane season is at its peak, so be ready to stake, shelter, or harvest crops ahead of a storm. Mulch the new beds, fertilize the established ones, and plant fall flowers and herbs to draw the migrating pollinators.
Zone 8b (north Florida & the Panhandle): prime fall planting. Set out tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, cabbage, and collards, and direct-sow squash, cucumbers, beans, and the first cool-season greens as the worst heat eases and the rains begin to taper.
Zone 9a (north-central Florida): the fall garden hits full stride. Transplant tomatoes and peppers, direct-sow beans, squash, and greens, and start the cool-season brassicas — broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower — for the long winter garden ahead.
Zone 9b (central Florida): begin the big fall planting. Set out tomatoes and peppers for a fall crop, direct-sow warm-season vegetables, and start cool-season transplants as the heat and rains finally begin to ease.
What's at the Farmers Market
September markets sit in the late-summer lull between the tropical-fruit peak and the coming fall vegetables, but south Florida's tropical fruit carries on. Florida avocados (the large light-green tropical type) are at their peak, alongside longans, mamey sapote, carambola (starfruit), canistel, sapodilla, guava, passionfruit, and black sapote from the south Florida tropical-fruit stands. The very last mangoes finish the season.
The mainland vegetable harvest is still at its summer low, but the first fall plantings begin to come in late in the month, and the markets carry okra, southern peas, eggplant, hot peppers, boniato, calabaza, and tropical greens. Florida honey remains plentiful, with the late-season wildflower honeys coming in, and roadside stands carry boiled peanuts and cane syrup. Judge a Florida avocado by a gentle give near the stem, ripening firm ones on the counter; choose fragrant, slightly soft guavas and passionfruit; pick longans with firm bright shells and refrigerate them; and use the soft tropical fruit promptly once ripe.
Night Sky This Month
September nights begin to lengthen and cool slightly in Florida as the wet season winds toward its end, and the autumn sky returns. Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, Florida's first certified International Dark Sky Park, resumes its fall star-party schedule on the wide unlit prairie, and Big Cypress National Preserve and the Everglades offer the other great dark-sky escapes from the Orlando, Tampa, and Miami glow. The clearing post-storm skies of late September can be beautifully transparent over the flat horizon.
The fall equinox near September 22 evens out day and night. In the evening, the Summer Triangle of Vega, Deneb, and Altair still rides high while the Milky Way arches overhead through Cygnus and down into Sagittarius in the southwest. The great square of Pegasus climbs the eastern sky with the Andromeda Galaxy — the most distant object visible to the naked eye — riding alongside it, well placed from a dark Florida site. There is no major meteor shower this month, so the moonless nights are best spent tracing the Milky Way and hunting Andromeda. The printable Florida night-sky guide lists this year's planet positions and dark-sky sites for your region.
Butterflies & Pollinators
September keeps Florida's butterflies abundant and brings the start of the fall monarch migration. The state butterfly, the zebra longwing, and the gulf fritillary are everywhere on passionflower, and the big swallowtails — giant, palamedes, spicebush, and eastern tiger — patrol the woods. Cloudless and orange-barred sulphurs, white peacocks, common buckeyes, long-tailed and tropical checkered skippers, and the coastal great southern whites fly through the warm days.
The fall monarch migration builds, funneling down the Gulf coast toward the St. Marks NWR lighthouse on the Panhandle — one of the classic October concentration points — drawn to the late-season mistflower and saltbush nectar, while the non-migratory south Florida monarchs and the resident queens keep breeding on milkweed. The south Florida tropical specialties stay on the wing — the ruddy daggerwing, Florida and dingy purplewings, mangrove buckeye, julia, the atala hairstreak on coontie, and the rare Schaus' swallowtail in the Keys. The fall wildflowers — blazing star, goldenrod, mistflower, firebush, and Spanish needles — keep nectar abundant for the migrants and residents alike.
Trees This Month
September trees still hold the dense green of the wet season, with the first faint signals of fall. The sabal palm, the state tree, ripens its clusters of small black fruit above the fan crowns, feeding robins, woodpeckers, and raccoons, and the live oaks begin dropping their acorns for the deer, turkeys, and jays. The black gum (tupelo) and red maple of the swamps show the earliest touches of red as the days shorten.
The native fruiting trees feed the migrants now — the dahoon and American holly, black cherry, beautyberry, elderberry, and wild grape are loaded, and the seagrape ripens purple along the south coast. South Florida's tropical trees keep their lush growth, the strangler figs and gumbo-limbos push new leaves, and the red mangroves of the Keys finish dropping their propagules. The bald cypress swamps of Corkscrew and Big Cypress stand dense and flooded, just beginning to hint at their coming russet color, and the Panhandle longleaf pines hold full open crowns over the wiregrass as the fire-and-rain season nears its end.
Go deeper with the Florida guides
The complete Florida birding, native-plant, wildflower, and night-sky guides — or the whole year in one bundle.
Same month elsewhere: September in Georgia · September in Idaho · September in Illinois