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. 

I realize it’s Birding 101 to say that the best time to look for birds is early in the morning, but I took a walk the other day that really drove home the point.

I was driving past a park about half an hour before sunrise and decided that my destination was just going to have to wait. I was stopping for a quick walk first. Two and a half hours later … 

The walk started when the sun was still lower than the distant hills to the east. It was light enough to see where I was going, however, and the birds were up and at ’em too. Boy were they ever.

A dozen or more eastern bluebirds, just as many yellow rumped-warblers and a few palm warblers highlighted the walk.

The fall migration does not get the attention and building excitement that the spring migration gets, but if you hit it on the right day, it can be a day worth remembering. This walk started out extremely slowly, in terms of seeing birds anyway. For the first hour, I heard a few cardinals, catbirds and eastern towhees in the brush and a few crows and blue jays “cawing” and “jaying” overhead. That was about it.

Even the pond was void of any birds. I don’t think I’ve ever been there and not seen geese and mallards. Often, there is a great blue heron or two and some American black ducks. Not this time.

In the New England bird world, there is the ring-necked pheasant and the ring-necked duck. The ring-necked duck should probably be called the ring-billed duck, but that’s a story for another day. Then there is the ring-billed gull, but that’s also not relevant to this column.

The other day, my son Andrew and I came across a ring-necked animal of another sort. It was a ring-necked snake, and it is very aptly named.

While walking to the cafe at work the other day, I found this critter in a tree by the sidewalk. It’s the caterpillar of an eastern tiger swallowtail. (Below is a photo of the butterfly that was taken earlier this fall.)

The caterpillars of eastern tiger swallowtails are typically green but go through a brown phase before turning green. The “eyes” on the caterpillar are not really eyes, obviously, but markings to make it look intimidating.