Policeman Bluejay or Babes in Birdland is a children's novel written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by Maginel Wright Enright.

Such commercial success justified a sequel: Baum took his Policeman Bluejay character from the Twinkle Tale "Bandit Jim Crow" and cast him in a separate novel, to be issued the following year.

Baum published many works – adventure stories, melodramas, and juvenile novels — under pseudonyms; early experience had taught him that he ended up "competing with himself" if he released too much material under his own name.

[8] Baum wrote a preface to Policeman Bluejay that expressed this goal unambiguously; he noted that along with the "amusement" the story provides, he hoped it would inspire "a little tenderness for the helpless animals and birds" his young readers encountered in their lives.

They encounter a "tuxix" — a creature that looks like a spiny turtle, but is in reality "a magician, a sorcerer, a wizard, and a witch all rolled into one...and you can imagine what a dreadful thing that would be."

Policeman Bluejay, the force of order in the avian world of the forest, leads the two child-larks on a flight through the sky; he esconces them in an abandoned thrush's nest in a maple tree, and with the help of a friendly eagle he retrieves their picnic basket (so that they don't have to eat bugs, worms, and grubs).

Beyond Paradise, in "the coarse, outer world," there is trouble in birdland; Policeman Bluejay must cope with a rebellion among the rooks, who would make the other birds their slaves.

The King Bird of Paradise and his Royal Necromancer have told the children that they can restore themselves to human form by eating a fruit called "tingle-berries."

The author restricts himself to a simple language for his young audience; yet within this simplicity he paints a lush, lustrous, luxuriant prose poem of imaginative effects.

Policeman Bluejay delivers his young charges to the Guardian of the Entrance to Paradise (the Jay himself is too deeply tainted by the outer world to enter).

Baum's Policeman Bluejay partakes of a deep tradition in literature and storytelling, folklore and myth, which employs the animal world, especially birds and bees, as metaphor for the human condition.

Chaucer's The Parliament of Fowls is probably the best-known work in this vein, though various others can be cited,[10] most commonly involving birds,[11] and in Indian, Persian, and Arabic literature as well as Western.

(One major distinction applies: writers like Chaucer and Day were primarily interested in commenting on human society, and used their animal metaphors as means to that end.