Long-tailed Skipper (Urbanus proteus)
A stocky brown skipper with a shimmer of blue-green over its body and wing bases and two long tails trailing from the hindwings, the long-tailed skipper is one of the easiest skippers in the Americas to name. Its caterpillar is the bean leafroller of southern vegetable gardens, folding a leaf into a tent and eating the rest of the plant from inside it.
By Poppy GlendeningPublished December 7, 2018Updated September 16, 2026✓ Reviewed by Dr. James Watuwa
In this guide
Description and identification
The long-tailed skipper is a member of the skipper family, Hesperiidae, and of the subfamily Eudaminae, the large tropical skippers whose caterpillars feed on broad-leaved plants rather than grasses. Skippers sit slightly apart from the rest of the butterflies: the body is heavy and moth-like, the head is wide, the antennae end in a club that is drawn out into a small hook, and the flight is a blur rather than a flutter. This species adds two features that make it unusually easy to name — a pair of long, straight tails on the hindwings and a wash of iridescent blue-green scaling over the body and the inner third of the wings.
Adult butterfly
- Wingspan: 1.5–2.4 in (38–60 mm), with the tails adding a further half inch behind the hindwings.
- Upperside: dark brown to blackish brown with a row of semi-transparent white or glassy spots across the middle of the forewing and one or two smaller ones near the tip. The body, the wing bases and the inner part of both wings are covered in metallic blue-green hair and scales; in strong sun this can look almost turquoise, and in worn individuals it fades to dull olive.
- Underside: lighter brown with the same glassy forewing spots showing through, and two darker brown bands running across the hindwing. The bands are the most reliable underside mark, because a resting skipper usually hides its upperside.
- Tails: long, narrow and dark, held straight out behind. They break off easily, so a tailless individual with blue-green scaling and two dark hindwing bands is still a long-tailed skipper.
- Sexes: the male carries a costal fold, a narrow flap along the leading edge of the forewing that encloses specialised scent scales. Females lack it entirely, tend to be slightly larger and often show broader glassy spots. This is the only wholly reliable way to sex the butterfly.
How to identify a long-tailed skipper in the field
Watch for a fast, low, jerky flight along a garden border, a weedy field edge or a hedgerow, ending with a butterfly that lands and holds its forewings up and its hindwings flat — the half-open posture typical of skippers. Look first for the tails, then for the green-blue gloss on the shoulders and body. No other tailed butterfly in the United States is brown with a metallic green body. The silver-spotted skipper is about the same size and equally common in gardens, but it has no tails and carries one large silver-white patch under the hindwing, and grass skippers such as the fiery skipper are small, orange and tailless.
Life cycle: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis and adult
In the tropics the long-tailed skipper breeds continuously and generations overlap all year. In the southern United States there are three or more broods between spring and late autumn, and numbers build steadily through the season to a peak in September and October. From egg to adult takes about a month in warm weather.
Eggs
The female lays her eggs on the underside of a host leaf, either singly or, very characteristically, in short stacks and clusters of two to six. Each egg is a small dome, about 1 mm across, pale greenish-white to yellow, with fine vertical ribs running down the sides. Eggs darken shortly before hatching, which follows in three to five days. The clustered laying habit is worth knowing: most butterflies lay strictly one egg at a time, and a neat group of domed eggs under a bean leaf in the southern states almost always belongs to this species.
Caterpillar
This is the stage most gardeners meet, and it has its own name: the bean leafroller. The young caterpillar cuts a flap from the edge of a leaf, folds it over and fastens it down with silk, then lives inside the resulting tent and comes out to feed. As it grows it builds larger shelters, sometimes tying two or three leaves together. The larva is yellowish-green to pale green with a dark green line down the back and one or two yellow to orange stripes along each side, a distinctly large black head, and an orange or yellow collar just behind it. Many individuals show two small orange spots on the face. It reaches about 1.2–1.6 in (30–40 mm) over five instars in roughly two to three weeks.
Chrysalis
Pupation happens inside the last leaf shelter or in fallen leaf litter below the plant. The chrysalis is tan to reddish brown, smooth and rounded, and is dusted with a white waxy bloom that the larva secretes before the final moult; against dead leaves it is very hard to pick out. The adult emerges after about ten days in summer, and in the northern part of the range it is the pupa in the leaf litter that is killed by the first hard frost.
Adult
Adults live for roughly two weeks. They fly from the first warm days of the season in the far south, and in the tropics the whole life cycle runs without a break. A female can lay well over a hundred eggs over her life, spread across many plants, which is why a bean patch can go from clean to visibly rolled within a fortnight.
Where the long-tailed skipper lives
The long-tailed skipper is one of the most widespread butterflies in the American tropics. Its permanent range runs from northern Argentina and Paraguay north through Brazil, the Andean countries, Central America and Mexico, across the Greater and Lesser Antilles, and into the southern United States. Note that it is a butterfly of the warm north of Argentina, not the cold Patagonian south, a point often garbled in older accounts.
In the United States it breeds permanently in peninsular Florida, along the Gulf coast and in southern Texas, and it is resident in southern Arizona and southern California. From that base it spreads north every summer as a seasonal emigrant, and in a good year individuals reach the Carolinas, the lower Midwest and occasionally as far as New York and Connecticut. These northern colonists breed, produce a late-season generation and are then wiped out by winter, so the range advances and retreats each year in the same way as several other warm-climate migrating butterflies.
Habitat is open and disturbed rather than forested: brushy fields, weedy roadsides, woodland margins, hedgerows, canal and levee banks, vegetable plots, parks and suburban gardens. Wherever a wild or cultivated legume grows in sunshine, the butterfly will find it, and it is as much at home in a city allotment as in second growth.
Host plants and diet
Caterpillar host plants. Caterpillars feed on legumes, the pea and bean family Fabaceae, and the species is a genuine generalist within it. Wild host plants include beggarweeds and tick-trefoils (Desmodium), hog peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata), butterfly pea (Centrosema), wild beans (Strophostyles) and many other climbing vines. Cultivated ones include the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), lima and pole beans, cowpea, soybean and wisteria. Because the larvae roll and skeletonise leaves, they are treated as a minor pest of beans in Florida and along the Gulf, although healthy plants normally outgrow the damage and pesticide treatment is rarely justified in a garden.
Adult diet. Adults are enthusiastic and unfussy nectar feeders with an unusually long proboscis for their size, which lets them work deep tubular flowers that many butterflies cannot reach. Favourites include shepherd's needle and other Bidens, lantana, bougainvillea, hibiscus, verbena, blue porterweed, buttonbush and pentas. They also visit flowering legumes and, less often, damp ground. Flowering plants in the sun at the edge of a garden will hold long-tailed skippers all afternoon in late summer, which is when they are easiest to photograph.
Behavior and flight
Flight. The flight is fast, low and erratic, with rapid wingbeats and abrupt changes of direction, and it gives the family its name: skippers appear to skip from point to point. A disturbed individual can cross a garden in a couple of seconds and is almost impossible to follow by eye.
Perching and basking. At rest the butterfly usually holds the forewings raised and the hindwings spread flat, which shows off the tails and the blue-green gloss at the same time. In cool morning sun it may spread all four wings flat against a leaf to warm up. Males perch on prominent leaves at about waist height through the middle of the day and dart out at anything passing, returning to the same leaf repeatedly.
Scent and courtship. The male's costal fold is a scent organ. During courtship he flies close to the female and releases pheromones from the pouch, and the fold also explains why the leading edge of a male's forewing looks slightly thickened when the butterfly is held.
Defence. The tails are thought to work as a decoy, drawing a bird's or lizard's strike away from the head to the least important part of the wing, which is why so many adults are found with the tails broken off and the hindwing margin nicked. The caterpillar relies on its leaf shelter and on dropping to the ground on a silk thread when disturbed. Neither stage is toxic. The main enemies are parasitoid wasps and tachinid flies, predatory bugs including the Florida predatory stink bug, spiders and birds. Populations can also collapse when a nuclear polyhedrosis virus sweeps through dense late-season larvae, one reason autumn numbers swing so widely from year to year.
Similar butterflies and how to tell them apart
| Species | Looks like | How to separate it from the long-tailed skipper |
|---|---|---|
| Dorantes longtail, Urbanus dorantes | Almost identical shape, same tails, same habitats | No blue-green iridescence anywhere on the body or wings; plain warm brown, with the underside hindwing bands broader and more diffuse. This is the species most often misidentified as a long-tailed skipper |
| Brown longtail, Urbanus procne | Brown tailed skipper of the same size | No glassy white spots on the forewing at all, and no green scaling; a butterfly of southern Texas and the tropics |
| Silver-spotted skipper, Epargyreus clarus | Large brown skipper with glassy forewing spots | No tails, gold-orange forewing band, and one big silver-white patch in the middle of the hindwing underside |
| Fiery skipper, Hylephila phyleus | Common garden skipper seen at the same flowers | Much smaller, orange and tailless, with short antennae and scattered dark spots below; a grass feeder rather than a legume feeder |
| Hairstreaks such as the gray hairstreak | Small butterflies with hindwing tails | Thin tails with white tips, a slow fluttering flight, and clubbed antennae without the skipper's hook; they rub the hindwings together when perched |
Quick facts
| Scientific name | Urbanus proteus (Linnaeus, 1758) |
|---|---|
| Family | Hesperiidae (skippers), subfamily Eudaminae |
| Wingspan | 1.5–2.4 in (38–60 mm) |
| Distribution | Northern Argentina north through tropical America and the West Indies to the southern United States, spreading far north each summer |
| Habitat | Brushy fields, roadsides, wood edges, hedgerows, vegetable plots and gardens |
| Host plants | Legumes: beggarweed, hog peanut, butterfly pea, wild and cultivated beans, cowpea, wisteria |
| Adult food | Nectar from lantana, shepherd's needle, bougainvillea, verbena, pentas and other flowers |
| Lifespan of adults | About two weeks |
| Broods | Continuous in the tropics; three or more a year in the southern United States |
| Defence | Speed, hindwing tails that deflect strikes, and a rolled-leaf shelter for the caterpillar |
| Conservation status | Common, widespread and not threatened |
Did you know?
- The caterpillar is the reason the species has a second name. As the bean leafroller it is a recognised minor pest of beans in Florida and the Gulf states, and agricultural entomologists have studied it far more closely than butterfly watchers have.
- A West Indian subspecies, Urbanus proteus domingo, flies in the Bahamas and parts of the Antilles and differs mainly in the size and shape of the pale forewing spots.
- The blue-green colour is not a pigment. It comes from layered structures in the scales and hairs, so it changes with the angle of light and disappears altogether as the scales wear off, leaving old individuals plain brown.
- Only males have the costal fold, and it is a pocket, not a marking. Rubbed open, it releases the scent used in courtship, which is why the character is invisible in a photograph but obvious in the hand.
- Skippers are butterflies, not moths, despite the thick body and the blurred flight. The hooked tip on the antennal club is the giveaway, and no moth has it.
- Late-season population crashes caused by a caterpillar virus are well documented in Florida, and can remove a large share of the autumn larvae in a matter of weeks.
In summary
The long-tailed skipper is a brown, heavy-bodied skipper with glassy forewing spots, two long hindwing tails and a metallic blue-green sheen on the body and wing bases. It ranges from northern Argentina to the southern United States and pushes far north each summer before winter erases the gains. Its caterpillar, the bean leafroller, is yellow-green with a big black head and lives inside a folded leaf; the pale-dusted chrysalis hides in that same shelter or in the litter below. Check the green shoulders and the two dark bands under the hindwing to separate it from the plainer dorantes longtail.
Long-tailed Skipper butterfly pictures
Frequently asked questions about the long-tailed skipper butterfly
What does a long-tailed skipper caterpillar look like?
It is yellowish-green with a dark green line down the back and one or two yellow or orange stripes along each side, and it has a large black head with an orange or yellow collar just behind it. Many show two small orange spots on the face. It grows to about 1.2 to 1.6 inches and lives inside a rolled leaf.
How big is a long-tailed skipper?
The wingspan is about 1.5 to 2.4 inches, or 38 to 60 millimetres, with the tails adding roughly another half inch behind the hindwings. Females average a little larger than males. That is a medium-sized butterfly with a stocky, moth-like body, which is what gives it its powerful and very fast flight.
What colour is an adult long-tailed skipper?
Dark brown to blackish brown, with a row of semi-transparent white spots across each forewing and a metallic blue-green sheen over the body, the wing bases and the inner part of the wings. The underside is paler brown and crossed by two darker bands on the hindwing. Worn individuals lose the green and look plain brown.
How long does the long-tailed skipper chrysalis stage last?
About ten days in warm summer weather. The chrysalis is tan to reddish brown, smooth, and covered with a white waxy bloom, and it is formed inside the caterpillar's last rolled-leaf shelter or in the leaf litter under the host plant. In the north it is this stage that is killed by the first hard frost.
How do you tell a male long-tailed skipper from a female?
Look at the leading edge of the forewing. Males have a costal fold, a narrow flap enclosing scent scales, which females lack completely. Females also average slightly larger and often have broader, paler glassy spots on the forewing. The fold is the only wholly reliable character, and it is easier to see in the hand than in a photograph.
Where are long-tailed skippers found?
From northern Argentina and Paraguay north through tropical South and Central America, Mexico and the West Indies to the southern United States, where it breeds permanently in Florida, the Gulf states, southern Texas, Arizona and southern California. Each summer it spreads north, sometimes reaching the Carolinas, the lower Midwest and the Northeast before winter kills those colonies.
What is the flight pattern of a long-tailed skipper?
Fast, low and erratic, with rapid wingbeats and sudden changes of direction, so the butterfly appears to skip from place to place. At rest it usually holds the forewings raised and the hindwings spread flat, and in cool morning sun it may open all four wings against a leaf to warm up before flying.
Is the long-tailed skipper a pest?
The caterpillar, known as the bean leafroller, is a minor pest of beans, cowpeas and related crops in Florida and along the Gulf coast, where it rolls and eats the leaves. Healthy plants usually outgrow the damage, and in a home garden the damage is cosmetic, so insecticide treatment is rarely worth it.
Why does the long-tailed skipper have tails?
The tails are thought to act as a decoy. A bird or lizard aiming for the moving tails strikes the rear edge of the hindwing rather than the head and body, and the butterfly escapes with torn wings. Many adults are found with the tails broken off, which supports the idea and does not affect identification.
Is the long-tailed skipper a butterfly or a moth?
It is a butterfly. Skippers have the stout body and rapid flight people associate with moths, but their antennae end in a club that is drawn out into a small hook, a feature no moth has. They fly by day, and they are classed in their own butterfly family, the Hesperiidae.
