A White-headed Pygmy Nuthatch

I soon started calling the white-headed bird visiting my Prescott feeders Uncle Fester. Like the well-known member of the Addams family, the bird appeared bald, and the black stripes on both sides of its face made the bird's eyes look dark and sunken. In my years of birdwatching, I had never seen anything like it.

After I realized it wasn't an exotic new species, I began to think it was a white-breasted nuthatch with a color variation. Maybe the bird was missing its head's black patch that sometimes appears like a thin black stripe stretching between its eyes from beak to nape. Then I thought it might be a red-breasted nuthatch, a bird that only rarely visits my yard.

But I soon recognized the bird as a pygmy nuthatch without its normally gray head feathers. As I studied the photographs I took, I also discovered it lacked any buff hue in its sides and belly. Uncle Fester was leucistic, having a genetic condition where an animal has an absence of at least some of its species' normal pigmentation.

But what might have been oddest about this odd bird was how alone it was. The pygmy nuthatches that visit my yard and its feeders and birdbaths tend to travel in at least pairs. I often see three or more together, especially when fledglings are begging their parents for food. But over more than the week that I've been observing Uncle Fester, he's been flying solo, quite literally.

In my Phoenix neighborhood, I once observed a pair of Abert's towhees where one of the birds was leucistic. Its face wasn't colored its normal beige but was mostly white, along with much of the bird's torso. The other bird didn't seem to mind that its partner was so different. In Prescott, apparently, birds of a feather flock together. Hopefully for Uncle Fester, that proverb will soon prove itself false.