These last few days of Indian summer in central Michigan have been splendid. Neither my wife, Nedra nor I am a trained biologist but we love to sit in our back yard in the late afternoon sipping some red wine and watching nature.

Our yard is a perfect grove surrounded by trees and shrubs, with the wide sky above with fleets of cloud ships moving silently from west to east. At its center we have a feeding station with a ground feeder for the squirrels and chipmunks, hanging tubes for the birds, and several bird baths.

We have come to appreciate the group of blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) that come every day. Some people don’t like jays because they are bossy and cause the smaller birds to move over for them. However we have observed several traits that make them personable.

We cannot tell males from females, but each bird has slightly different white markings that stand out against the deep blue of their feathers so we can distinguish one from the other. They have a pouch in their throats just behind the shrewd beak. We have seen these birds take twelve to fifteen sunflower seeds at one visit to the tubes. That is an evolutionary survival benefit that pays off in fewer trips back to the feeder.

We began feeding them unsalted peanuts in the shell and this truly tells of each bird’s personality. Nedra buys seven or eight pounds of nuts from Ric’s Market which lasts at most a week. When I bring out the sack I call “Peanuts!” and within a minute the first blue jay arrives. Sometimes it will issue a raucous cry. The others appear within a minute or two.

There is the skeleton of a dead Hawthorn tree in the yard that serves as their roost during feeding. They also perch on the rain gutters of our family room and high in the shrubs behind us. There are eight to twelve that come regularly.

The most faithful to appear is what we believe to be a family of three. The “father” is brazen and comes closest to take the nuts just two feet away from our chairs. Not only that but if there are two or three peanuts in a cluster he will pick each up, weighing it and then chooses the largest. He often will take the first nut of the afternoon up to the rain gutter, cracks it open and eats the peanuts within. The “mother” is more cautious and takes her picks farther out, perhaps five feet from us. The child was born this spring and has grown to adult size during the season. “He” is a klutz. He swoops down, lands and then hops to the nearest shell. It may well be just a hull but he grabs it and flies away with it. His father often chases after him to scold him.

When a bird has a peanut in its beak it will fly off, each time in a different direction. It will return by a new route to roost and wait for another chance. This may be a way of “confusing” us as the location of its cache of nuts. They come back too quickly to have eaten every nut so they must be storing them.

When we decide to go in we leave a scattering of nuts. The birds clean up after us within a few minutes as the shadows lengthen and evening approaches.