“Now it’s past my bed I know, I’d really like to go, soon it will be the break of day, sitting here in Blue Jay Way,” – George Harrison

When I was a young boy, my sister and I slept in twin beds that were given to us as a gift from our aunt, Gertrude. The headboards of the beds each had three compartments for storing items with a door that slid on a slot in between them. The door had a little, early American styled, plate and handle affixed to the front of the door to make it easier to move.

It was behind this door, in the left-hand compartment, that I stored some of my most treasured items: my collection of Herbert Spencer Zim nature-guides and a small reproduced set of “The Birds of America” plates painted by the master himself, John James Audubon.

The Zim books covered a wide range of North American nature, with each small volume specializing in a specific topic. Titles in the collection ranged from seashells, fossils and weather to trees, reptiles and amphibians, fishes, insects and birds. The books were given to me by my parents.

Zim began his “Golden Guides” series in 1945. Each of the 160-page children’s nature guides could fit in a pocket. According to an Internet write-up on Zim, “No budding young naturalist in the 1950s-1970s would venture into the field without one or more of these books in her/his backpack or pockets.”

I would concur. Zim ultimately created more than 100 books.

The New York Times described the Zim guides as “concise, engaging and comprehensible to children without being simplistic.” My collection numbers just under 30 of the beautiful little books that are packed with dozens of wonderful paintings of plants and animals in nature, along with text and range maps showing general distribution of each species.

I spent so much time as a kid staring at these pictures, reading, memorizing and turning the pages – soaking up images and information into my little brain. In the Audubon painting book, the birds were painted in settings where they exhibited their various intrinsic behaviors.

Some of these paintings have stuck in my head for years and years because of their gorgeous beauty and some of the scenes depicted – some which were shocking to a boy. Through these paintings and books and television programs like “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” and more, I learned about conservation and the harsh realities of nature.

One of the Audubon paintings I was both shocked and enamored with was one that showed three blue jays perched on a dead tree branch that was wrapped in a green vine that had produced red-and-yellow tubular flowers. This scene depicted the blue jay’s habit of robbing the nests of other birds.

At the top of the branch sits one blue jay readying itself to eat from a white-shelled egg it has cracked open and held still against a branch with one of its feet. The contents of the egg are dripping from the broken eggshell and branch down into the mouth of a second jay pictured at the center right of the painting.

Countering on the left, there is a blue jay perched on the back side of the branch, with its breast facing the viewer. One of the white, dripping eggs has been punctured by this jay with its bill pushed inside the shell up to the hilt. Audubon contributed greatly to art and appreciation of birds, including my own, albeit long after he had died.

There are some revisionists today who would like to whitewash John James Audubon out of our memories forever because he was “a slave owner, grave robber and fraud who invented birds, and falsified scientific results.”

However, people are complicated, conflicted and challenged, especially when judged on their actions nearly 175 years after their death. Unlike these people, who are in the process of removing honorary names from all North American bird species, I celebrate John James Audubon for his contributions to ornithology and art worldwide, as well as to me personally.

His blue jay painting alone has impacted me for nearly my entire life – almost as long as the species itself. As a kid, blue jays are usually one of the first birds you learn to identify because their “jay-jay-jay” songs are common and easily recognized in these Great North Woods.

The striking shades of varying blue we see in the bird’s plumage are almost impossible to ignore, whether we see one in our backyard, flying across the road in front of us or perched in a tree around our campsite.

Even small children are quick to point out a blue when it appears around them. The sight is often abrupt, perhaps loud, and may last a few minutes or more. Perhaps surprisingly, the brilliant blues of blue jays aren’t produced by colored feathers. Rather, like other blue-colored species, blue jay color is created by the microscopic structure of its feathers, which contain air pockets that reflect blue light back to us. Melanin also helps produce the blue we see.

It’s hard to get my mind around those facts when I see the vivid deep, deep blue of a blue jay. It’s hard to accept that it’s an optical illusion of sorts. Over the past week, we have had as many as eight jays at a time on our bird feeders in our yard. For us, that’s a lot.

They sometimes squawk and bite at each other when competing for favorite foods, like our peanut-butter-covered suet cakes. Today, I watched a blue jay eat on the left-hand side of a suet feeder, sharing the cake with a male hairy woodpecker perched on the opposite side.

This cross-species acceptance was interesting to see, especially when another jay replaced the woodpecker a few seconds later and was vigorously chased away by the first jay.

Blue jays seem to be willing and able to eat from just about any type of feeder. I’ve seen them eat seeds from the ground, a platform, hopper, tube or seed cakes enclosed in a cage, like suet.

About the only feeder they don’t eat from is the small-screened thistle seed feeders more suitable to finches and redpolls.

While watching the blue jays over a few days at our feeders, I also saw a pileated woodpecker do something interesting. The large female bird was too big to perch on a small tube feeder that contained fruit-flavored suet balls.

So, she perched along the side of one of the feeding station posts and tipped her head almost all the way back until she could reach and extract the suet balls from the adjacent mesh-metal feeder.

The following morning, she was back out there doing the same thing, competing favorably against chickadees, nuthatches and downy woodpeckers for the same food.

Today was a blustery day, with a lot of soft snow falling, piling up and being blown around like beach sand. A blue jay flew in for a landing on the snow-covered top crossbeam of the feeding station.

It disappeared into the snow on the far side of the beam and plowed through the snow, splashing it up like a surfer moves a wave or a slow-motion shot from a snowmobile commercial when a sled throws snow toward the camera in wide-scatter fashion.

I like blue jays. Not as my favorite bird species, but I like them as part of the overall wildlife presence in eastern and boreal forests.

My favorite jay species that I have seen is the Steller’s jay of the American west, named – at least for now – by German Georg Steller who first recorded the bird in the 1700s.

I’ve also seen blue-colored scrub jays and Mexican jays out west. I think the dark tuft on the top of the Steller’s jay and its deep blue or blue-black coloring elsewhere is deeply satisfying.

I’ll reserve final judgment on my favorite jay, until I see a green jay one day.

The clownlike facial coloring of blue, white and black with a tropical green-colored body makes this jay appear to be almost unreal.

I’d have to go to south Texas to see one of them, but the trip might be worth it.

There are numerous additional species I have never seen in Texas. Much like wondrous southwest Arizona, Texas has plenty to offer birdwatchers.

Even though I am much older now, I still love to look at Audubon plates or Zim Golden Guides. I have sent Zim guides as gifts to youngsters in my life who have expressed an interest in nature and the outdoors.

I’m sure the little books, like everything else, are not for everyone.

But for those who get hooked, my guess is they will get hooked for life.

At least that’s what happened to me.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.