Throughout the years, LEGO has released a flock of different bird-related sets. With the release of the latest of these, 10331 Kingfisher Bird, we are going to get a birdseye view and take a flight of fancy into the history of LEGO brick-built birds.
Since this set is the inspiration for this article, it’s worth starting with. LEGO provided BrickNerd with this set, just so we’re not robin you of the facts. When it arrived, I swooped right into it and built it quickly. I was pheasantly surprised! I can say that the Kingfisher is a great display piece and includes some wonderful recolored elements (trans clear pagoda plate anyone?). The build itself is fun and utilizes some very interesting techniques—and as a MOC builder myself, I’m very excited by some of the rare elements included! However, the Kingfisher (along with all those great parts) has already been stolen by my mother to use as a display piece in the entryway. She took one gander at it and thought it was egg-celent.
While the body and wings look great, the biggest gripe I have is with the head design. Eagle-eyed readers will notice when it is compared to its real-life counterpart, the head seems to be too tall, and the eye placement isn’t quite right. It’s a tight part of the build and may ruffle some feathers, so I wish it was more faithful to the real thing. But I’ll stop crowing about the head and pecking at the small details. Overall, there’s not that much fowl about the set.
I hope this is the beginning of a series of “UCS birds” to go along with the LEGO Botanicals line. With the recent push to release more complex curved elements, a wide variety of birds with more organic shapes should be possible. I’d personally love to see LEGO renditions of some of the birds I get to see in my backyard, like my state bird, the Gold Finch. It isn’t that bird-brained of an idea that LEGO could release a whole flock or even a crossover line between Botanicals and Birds, with a hummingbird and flowers set, for example. The biggest challenge will be setting a scale for the whole line or just considering each bird/set individually. Trying for “scale perfection” could be a wild goose chase.
Overall, the Kingfisher feels like a refined MOC and is a wonderful display piece. Before we migrate to a broader topic, I highly recommend checking out the review by New Elementary. They don’t duck the opportunity to analyze all the parts. They’re hawk-eyed with those kinds of details and have a great talon for pointing out NPU.
So, are you ready to soar into the past and quack the code of LEGO brick-built birds? Before we start, we need to sparrow some time to set some ground rules. This article will not cover minifigure-scale, moulded elements or even many of the small monthly promotional mini-builds. If I did, I’d go cuckoo. While I don’t enjoy parroting the facts, I had to duck around some of the sets because of volume, so take this list as an aerial tour of the highlights and not as a comprehensive guide to plastic ornithology.
Though before we begin, I’m going to beak my own rule and share something I was not expecting to find as I did research for this article… this set is not LEGO’s first Kingfisher! They released 40065 Kingfisher as a monthly mini-build back in 2013. So with that detour, let’s shake our tail feathers and dive in.
Surprisingly, there is a marked lack of LEGO bird-related sets released before 2000. In fact, the only System set I could find was set 1724, simply called Bird. Released in 1994 under the Basic theme, this is the simplest and smallest set on this list, consisting of only nine elements.
It reminded me of the newer duck polybag which seems to be a trend of having a small set that can be built in many different ways. These ducks are even immortalized in from of LEGO Campus in Billund, Denmark.
