Before it gets too far into the new year, I want to take a look back at my birding highlights from 2023. It was a good year all around with birds small and large. Thanks to you all for being a part of another year of sharing birding adventures.

Here is my annual top 10 list of birding highlights from the past year.

10. The Christmas Bird Count never fails to be a highlight of the year. Whether the birds are plentiful or not, it’s always a good day spent in the field with friends. The weather was cold, gray and damp, and the birds were fairly scarce, but our spirits remained high.

9. Along the same lines, I contributed to eBird more in 2023 than in years past. Checklists from eBird are entered into a massive database that scientists use to track bird populations. Millions of lists are submitted, so my contributions are pretty insignificant, but it all adds up. Anything to help the future of birds. Anyone can participate, regardless of skill level. Sign up through the eBird app or website.

8. I watched a flock of mallards at a park in Baltimore while I was in the city visiting my son at school. It was early in the fall duck migration, but something told me to look carefully at the dozens or hundreds of mallards that dominated the pond. Sure enough, three or four ring-necked ducks swam and rested among the mallards. Not an earth-shattering sighting, but I love my ducks and always love seeing them.

Every once in a while, birding throws a curveball.

To keep the baseball analogy going, curveballs aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Once some batters learn how to recognize a curveball, they prefer them to fastballs. It’s just a matter of seeing enough curveballs and getting enough experience with them. You could say it’s a learning curve.

In the birding world, curveballs come in all shapes, colors and sizes. That’s why they are called curveballs. I would define a curveball in this regard as any bird that looks different from what a field guide says it looks like.

Leucism is a common curveball the birding world likes to throw. Leucism is similar to albinism in that the bird appears white, mostly white, or patchy white. Robins, juncos and red-tailed hawks are birds often seen with leucism. That is not to say these birds have a high percentage of individuals with leucism, but rather if a bird with leucism is spotted in New England, it’s often one of those birds.

Here are a few more photos of the bald eagle I spotted at a rather unusual place a few weeks ago. Here’s the full story.

I have two routes to get to work each day. According to my GPS, each way takes the same exact amount of time to reach my destination.

The route I end up taking is usually a spur-of-the-moment decision right before I either go straight or take a left. Neither route is particularly conducive to seeing wildlife, unfortunately. However, one route does take me by a cemetery where I often see a large flock of wild turkeys. Sometimes that alone is enough to sway my spur-of-the-moment decision to take that route.

A flock of birds is not always as it appears to be.

No, I am not talking about the silly “birds aren’t real” conspiracy theory. I am talking about rare, or at least less common, birds often mixing in with a flock of common birds.

A common example of this is when a snow goose is found within a huge flock of Canada geese. At first glance, it may look like a run-of-the-mill flock of ultra-common Canada geese, but closer inspection sometimes yields a less common bird, such as a snow goose, among them. Snow geese, of course, are very common in their own right, but not necessarily in New England. Therefore, when one of these bright white geese shows up among a flock of Canada geese, it makes for a good birdwatching experience.

It is a time of transition for birdwatchers as we move from fall to winter. This being New England, it is safe to say that the winter birdwatching season starts in November despite the calendar saying winter doesn’t start until December 21.

It is not quite fully the winter birdwatching season as there are a few lingering fall migrants passing through and the typical winter birds have just started to arrive. As I pull Into my driveway these days, I am greeted by several dozen juncos flushing in every direction. I hadn’t seen them in these numbers since the transition from winter to spring earlier this year.