Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

This is me, Jim Baker. Wanna make something of it? You know winter is a hard time for Blue Jays. When the weather’s nice, they spend their days searching out food and water supplies. The lucky ones near a feeder get a few minutes here and there to cuss out owls and play practical jokes on each other. But the minute an ice storm hits or the temperature drops to 20 below, those jays hole up in a spruce tree, biding their time till conditions improve. It gets mighty unpleasant sitting out in a blizzard in a spruce tree. I know—before my jays trusted me well enough to move into my barn, I used to sit out there with them.

Last winter my jays were suffering from cabin fever something fierce, and I needed something to keep them occupied. They couldn’t get the hang of shuffling a pinochle deck, they kept stealing the eyes off my Mr. Potato Head, and I just couldn’t make them see the point behind Monopoly.

That’s when I set to work and came up with Baker’s Blue Jay Board Games. Yep, there’s 87 different games to choose from, all guaranteed to keep a whole family of jays entertained during the longest winter storm. In my version of Mousetrap, for instance, the winner catches and eats a real mouse. Playing Blue Jay Pursuit, your jays can show off their knowledge of important trivia, like how wide an owl opens its mouth, the best month for finding ripe acorns, and how many baby robins it takes to feed a family of seven for three weeks.

They’ll have fun playing Clue. Who killed poor Mr. Jay? Was it Professor Partridge, Colonel Muskrat, or Mrs. Peacock? And for quiet evenings, after the little fledglings finally go to bed, see how much fun those Blue Jay parents can have playing a round or two of my new adult only game, Naked as a Jaybird. Yep, keep your jays entertained this winter with Baker’s Blue Jay Board Games, available only at Baker’s Blue Jay Barn, Up the Shore a Ways.