I remember the day was much like this one, with snow being pushed around the yard by gusts of swirling winds. The temperature was lower than a cricket’s knees and with the windchill, it felt even colder.

But I was warm and in the kitchen of our old house on Barnum Street that was almost as old as the aging red ore mining town itself.

Like pretty much every day of my youth, I was looking out the window to the backyard.

From there, I could see the railroad trains slowly pulling into town from the west or the firemen racing to the station when the siren blew.

I could also see the grand, bare-branched maple tree that towered over our yard from the neighbor’s side of the fence. Its thick and rough-barked trunk was far too wide for me to reach my arms around, but it made the tree strong enough to climb.

Sometimes, my brother and I, as well as one or two of the neighborhood kids would climb up into the lower branches of that maple to sit like crows and watch the happenings below us, chewing gum, crunching corn chips or drinking a pop.

It was in those branches of that big maple tree, that’s still standing today, that I would first catch a glimpse of something that would fuel an obsession of mine that has lasted since birdwatching.

It was on that one snowy, gray day like today when the maple was decorated like a Christmas tree with roundish, rather large, birds.

They were bright yellow, most of them, with black and white wings. Others were kind of greenish-yellow and duller overall. Their beaks were big and thick and looked like they could snap one of my fingers off it they could ever get ahold of one.

There were probably three or four dozen of the birds sitting in the tree. They made noises loud enough to be heard through the window glass into the house. The sounds were sharp, short and raspy with a resonating bell-like after-note ringing quality to them.

I remember my mom and I wondering what kind of birds these were. I knew I had never seen them before, and they weren’t among the common backyard species I knew well, like rock pigeons, blue jays and robins.

So, the next day, I went to consult a bird book they had at the Carnegie public library a couple blocks down the street.

It was a field guide to the birds of North America east of the Rocky Mountains, the first of many field guides eventually produced in the line of Roger Tory Peterson.

Inside the hardcover volume, which was itself inside a plastic jacket protector, were black-and-white and colored paintings of birds.

The paintings included tiny black arrows pointing to various parts of the birds that would help readers determine what they saw.

These bird parts being pointed to are known as field marks. Having Peterson point them out in his guide was a big help in identifying birds.

In the back of the book, Peterson had a section of pink, purple, white and blue maps of the eastern U.S. showing where the various bird species lived during summer, winter and year-round.

The field marks, as well as tiny symbols near the drawings that indicated male and female plumaged birds, helped me figure out that the birds I had seen with my mom had been evening grosbeaks.

Unfortunately, the birds had only stayed in the maple tree for a few minutes before flying off in one big group over and past the neighbor’s house, heading out over the downtown.

I looked for them every day for a week or two after this initial sighting, but they didn’t return. I decided to put out some bird seed to see if they would come back to eat it.

Like a lot of people starting out feeding birds, I didn’t know what was going to be the best kind to put out. We just guessed.

At the grocery store my mom and I picked out a 5-pound plastic bag of “bird mix,” which was mostly round little yellowish-beige-colored seeds called millet with some white-striped, black sunflower seeds mixed in.

We put the seeds on a coffee can lid out in the backyard, but the grosbeaks did not return. Within a few days, we did attract a few black-capped chickadees and quite a few pigeons to the seed, which were common in our part of town.

At school, we kids made bird feeders by pushing a pencil through both sides of a quart-sized milk carton for a perch, with a square cut out on opposite sides of the carton above the perch to provide an access to the seeds that filled the bottom of the carton.

Again, we used the “bird mix,” which had northern cardinals and blue jays pictured on the outside of the plastic bag.

I thought it worked like it does with vegetable and flower seeds, what was pictured on the bag is what you would get if you planted this kind of seeds.

But it didn’t work out that way we just got more chickadees and pigeons.

I tried another trick I learned from a teacher at school, which was to ask the butcher at the grocery store for some beef suet, that hard, white fat from around the kidneys or loins.

We put the chunks of suet in a mesh onion or orange bag that we tied closed at the top and hung from one of the two steel crossarms of our clothesline posts.

The suet attracted European starlings, which were also common to our area. They were strange compared to other birds in that they looked arguably prettier in the wintertime than they did in the summer.

Though lacking the greenish and bluish iridescence of springtime and summer starlings, white speckles appear sharper and brighter during the wintertime.

With my new interest in bird feeding growing daily, my mom and dad eventually purchased a small hopper feeder.

These are the kind of feeders made from wood with two pieces of glass slid between tilted slots on opposing sides of the feeder. The slanted roof slides up and away from the feeder’s hopper body on a hanging rope or chain.

This allows for easy filling of the feeder. At the bottom, next to dowel rod perches for the birds, the grooves holding the glass plates stop, allowing seeds to pour out from the bottom of the hopper as the birds eat.

Back in those early kid days, there were only two kinds of bird seed that I ever remember seeing for sale in stores. The “bird mix” millet variety and solely sunflower seeds, which were more expensive.

After we got the hopper feeder, we decided to try the sunflower seeds instead of the millet mix. I excitedly watched at the window every day wondering what would happen.

As it turns out, the pigeons didn’t care for the sunflower seeds, but the chickadees kept coming.

Then, about a week after we first put the hopper feeder out, I was shocked and delighted to look out the window to see what I now knew was a female evening grosbeak.

She was sitting on one of the hopper feeder perches with a half-cracked sunflower seed crunched in her beak. She was so much closer than any of the grosbeaks had been when they were up in the tree. She was quite beautiful.

While I was focused, staring at her through a pair of old over-sized binoculars my dad had, a male grosbeak landed next to her.

He was even more handsomely marked, with much brighter plumage and a big yellow “V” marked on the top of his head.

His expression looked stern but the sounds he made were joyful.

In hindsight, all these years later, the evening grosbeaks that had charmed me at the young age of probably six or seven set me on a course of loving birds and seeking continuously to find out more about them.

I have since developed numerous favorites among Michigan bird species, with evening grosbeaks — which are now a threatened species in our state — not likely to even be within my top 10.

My top five, in no ranked order, are probably common nighthawk, barn owl, chimney swift, black-throated blue warbler and common loon.

My fascination with birds has given me countless hours of enjoyment, learning and discovering. I found out along the way that I am a lifelong learner and remain curious about a wide range of things.

I never would have thought that a now ingrained characteristic of mine could have begun with such a casual thing as the chance boyhood observation of a flock of birds in a backyard tree, on an otherwise drab and gray winter’s afternoon.

But it most assuredly did.

EDITOR’S NOTE: 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.