WILDLIFE OF THE WEEK
Parrot Waxcap Mushroom
Becoming more and more familiar with a natural area by visiting it year-round is one of the great pleasures of spending time outdoors. For the nature-curious, it’s a great way to see a place in all of its different “moods”, from different weather to different seasons, or when different plants, animals, and other organisms are behaving differently. After four and a half years haunting different parks and preserves in North Georgia, I’m always happily surprised to come across new acquaintances. This weekend, in my first Georgia nature stroll of the new year, I noticed an odd mystery mushroom I hadn’t seen before. It was brightly colored—I initially thought it was a fallen flower!—and as I uncovered it from beneath a pile of leaves I found it to be slimy and jelly-like. While I normally associate mushrooms with Fall, here was a showy-looking mushroom poking up from the forest floor in the gloomy overcast of a January afternoon!
A little help from iNaturalist and my favorite Field Guide to the Mushrooms of Georgia led me to the attractive name “Parrot waxcap”. This small mushroom, usually associated with grasses, can vary dramatically in bright colors over its lifetime, starting with a bright green and often shifting to yellow like the ones I found. They were described as edible, but bad-tasting, which I did not find particularly inviting. I was also tickled to see that this species is named after parrots in both its common and scientific name Gliophorus psittacinus, which translates to something like “glue-having parrot”. This interesting and unfamiliar mushroom is apparently also widespread in Europe; a lot of the websites I could find describing them were from UK naturalists.
This was a fun find—new organisms or happenings in familiar places always offer a touch of excitement and can change your relationship with a place. Next time I lead a nature walk at that park, for example, I’ll have trouble passing by that particular spot without telling a little story about sticky parrots.
LATEST BLOG POST
Bumblebee Basics: Nature’s Fuzziest Pollinators
My last Blog Post of 2025 was one I’ve been excited to write about for some time, focusing on the science and life history of bumblebees. Despite passing the 7th anniversary of my more serious delving into bug-watching as a hobby, I never got particularly good at identifying bumblebees or knowing much about them. However, getting some breathing room at the end of the semester gave me time to open up a book I picked up earlier this year, Bumblebees of North America: An Identification Guide, and its lengthy introductory chapter was extremely helpful. I felt validated to read that, depending on where you are, identifying bumblebees to species can be extremely challenging (different species can vary hugely in size and coloration depending on location and role within a colony!). Beyond that, I enjoyed an expert look into how they differ from other, better-known types of bees and why they show up more often in some places than others. For me, bumblebees have always been lovely and familiar sights on summer hikes in North America and Europe, and sure enough there is plenty of reason for that! Check out this latest post to find out why, and get answers to loads of other common bumblebee questions.
NATURALIST WORD OF THE WEEK
Psittaciformes (n.) - The order of birds to which all parrots belong, typically characterized by their strong, curved beak and X-shaped feet, with two claws facing forward, and two facing backwards. Although most numerous and diverse in the tropics, there is one species (the Kea of New Zealand) that is found in alpine areas, and North America once had a native parrot (the now-extinct Carolina Parakeet) which lived as far North as southern Wisconsin and Upstate New York.
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