Every spring we have a wonderful treat as we look out our kitchen window. We love birds and sometimes lament the cost of buying the seed, the continuous chore of filling up the feeders in the cold Wisconsin winters, and putting suet into the ‘cage’ with frozen fingers. But we do get some special rewards for our endeavors! We have an incredible visitor – an indigo bunting! Vibrant blue, small and cheerful, he makes us smile and we always vie for which of us will spot him first. He is our ‘bluebird of happiness’, you might say!

But long before he came along, I have loved blue birds. I have them in the kitchen, on old china pieces, on salt and pepper shakers, a creamer, a vase, and even a sentimental plate. My most recent treasure is a German, lustre canister set that is just covered with them! (This was a gift from dear hubby for our anniversary.)

As I glanced around at them this weekend, I realized they needed to be cleaned for anticipated guests and family. (Kitchen items do tend to get a bit ‘greasy’, even though I am constantly teased for not cooking a lot.) I began to wonder just why we call them ‘bluebirds of happiness’ and if this was a fairly new thought process. So, using one of my favorite tools, I “Googled” those words “Blue Bird of Happiness” and ‘voila’, I received the requested information and learned a lot.

It turns out that to many Native American tribes, the bluebird was sacred. According to the Cochiti tribe, the firstborn son of Sun was named Bluebird. The Navajo hold the Mountain Bluebird to be a great spirit in animal form and associate it with the rising sun. Their Bluebird song is still used in social settings and performed in the 9-day Ye’iibicheii Winter Nightway Ceremony.

I also learned that a popular song by Jan Peerce and Art Mooney and his orchestra called “Bluebird of Happiness” was recorded in 1948 and introduced at the Radio City Music Hall. There was also a stage play called “The Blue Bird” by Maurice Maeterlick in 1908. It was made into several films throughout the 20^th century, including the 1940 original starring Shirley Temple.

But the mythology of the bluebird actually goes back a lot farther. For example, in Europe, a noted fairy tale is called “L’Oiseau Bleu” (The Blue Bird) by Madame d’Aulnoy (1650-1705) and it seems to be the root of modern accounts of bluebird symbology and myth. In this tale, King Charming is transformed into a bluebird, who is the love interest of the younger princess Fiordelisa and aids her through her trials.

In magical symbology, bluebirds are used to represent confidence in the positive aspect and egotism in the negative. A dead bluebird is a symbol of disillusionment, or the loss of innocence, and of transformation from the younger and naïve to the older and wiser.

Indigenous cultures across the globe hold similar beliefs. It is the most universally accepted symbol of cheerfulness, happiness, prosperity, hearth and home, good health, new births, and the renewal of spring! Virtually any positive sentiments may be attached to the bluebird.

So I am not alone in my thinking. I will wear my bird pins and earrings regularly, display my blue birds around the house and whistle a cheerful song! How big is your bluebird collection?

I don’t yet know if my niece has the fabled collecting gene like I have, or if she’s just exhibiting mimicry of the behaviors that she sees in me, but she definitely has collections. Aside from the epic cache of Barbie and Bratz clothing items, she’s also the gleeful recipient of all of my extra Heroclix pieces (and probably has a few hundred by now, about 25% having been rendered limbless by uncareful feet), and most recently, she’s accumulated a wide array of Littlest Pet Shop figurines.

Every year at Christmas, my mom would hunt down a complete (or near complete) set of action figures for me, from some property that I was interested in. I recall full collections of Real Monsters and Earthworm Jim figures under the tree, and it was always a great feeling to get a headstart on a collection of something, Perhaps this is why I take the same approach to my niece’s Christmases. Last year, I imported a fairly expensive collection of dollhouse accessories from Japan, because she was into dollhouses - and the Japanese domestic gashapon scene seemed pretty amazing. This year, I found Littlest Pet Shop.

Knowing my buying habits, the Toys ‘R’ Us lady asked me if I was buying the armload of them for myself, and I quickly corrected her - but I was still excited about getting a wide array of adorable animals for my niece’s Pet Shop display. That she didn’t yet have. All of the animal 2-packs, and packs that consisted of an animal and a display piece, were less that five dollars each, and the selection was impressive… AND their heads bobble. What’s not to love?

So, I found one mini-figure of each major animal group for her. The insects, the bunnies, the dogs, the cats, the birds, the skunks… everyone, except for the damned seahorse. Sure, if trends held true, they’d re-release a different seahorse later, but not by the time Christmas came. My hands were stained pink from digging through those strawberry-scented girlie toy racks, all the while gripped with paranoia that I was being perceived as some kind of toy-scalping creep, stalking the pink aisles for profit and leering. At least the seahorse is now accessible again - even if my niece chose the dragonfly over the seahorse when she was given a choice at the store this weekend.

With a history of over 400 pets and counting, along with countless playsets and accessories, Littlest Pet Shop seems to be something with a lot of endurance for serious collectors and animal lovers alike. I admit to a certain peculiar weakness for setting things up in contained dioramas, and LPS appeals to that also, so I never mind playing with the mega-playhouse that you can buy for them. It probably comes from creating action-filled, organized scenes in the Ghostbusters Firehouse of my youth, and continued on into organizing the insanely cool Muppets Kitchen playset in more recent years (which had enough space, and working cabinets and drawers, to store almost every accessory that came with every figure in the line). Yes, these items are essentially boy dollhouses, and don’t even pretend that your 1979 Death Star playset was anything more than a wicked dollhouse with space lasers. Because, sorry guys, it was.

Recent auction results don’t reveal any extraordinarily expensive pieces - though a certain Littlest Pet Shop artisan is making a small mint on expertly crafted customized figures - usually of breeds of animals or species that have not yet been addressed by the existing 400+ animal collection, and a good handful of unicorns. These one-of-a-kind art pieces have gone up to $150, that price being established for a customized horse. Of course, horse collectors are also a bit intense. Aside from the custom figures, there’s the odd purple iguana or the new giraffe (pet #440) that go for about 40 bucks a pop, and that’s their OOP, or ‘out of package’ price. MIP, or ‘mint in package’ items usually fetch a lot more money.

So, we collect these as a team, my niece and I - and not for profit. It broadens my own toy hunting, also. One can only go to the toy store and leave empty handed so many times before you get jaded and despondent at the lack of re-stocks. There’s the satisfaction of finding the occasional new or rare animal, just as I’d get from finding a rare Two-Face action figure, and ultimately, a little girl being excited about adding a new friend to her pet shop is even more rewarding.

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The newswires are filled with stories on the recent discovery of the remains of a Dodo bird found in a cave beneath bamboo and tea plantations in Mauritius, an island located in the Indian Ocean.

Dodo remains are rare finds. The last time Dodo skeletons were discovered was in 2005 when a mass grave was found in the southeastern part of the island known as Mare aux Songes — but the hot, wet, acidic environment meant poor DNA survival. Before that 2005 discovery the previous Dodo remains were found in 1920.

What really thrills scientists is that this skeleton, named Fred, was found intact and, having been isolated in a cave, well preserved enough that ‘he’ may be an excellent DNA source. Julian Hume, a palaeontologist at London’s Natural History Museum, said, “Then you can work out how it actually got to Mauritius, because it must have originally flown here before evolving into flightlessness and the big, fat bird that we know.”

While all of this is exciting, especially to a science geek like me, the reason the story’s been making the newswire rounds is because Fred was discovered just days after those wacky Kovels had mentioned the Dodo in one of their newsletters. Yet the Kovels knew nothing of Fred’s discovery because both he and the information of his existence were guarded until after he was safely removed.

In their newsletter, dated June 7, 2007, the Kovels told the story of a stuffed Dodo at the Ashmolean Museum in England:

It was in sad condition, and in 1755 the trustees decided to destroy it rather than spend the time and money to preserve it. The dilapidated stuffed bird was just tossed into a fire. Only a leg and the head survived the flames. Fortunately the parts were saved by another museum and we hear the relics have undergone DNA testing.

We can only guess what the value would be today of a whole stuffed dodo bird. So remember as you think about your collection: Never throw anything away just because it’s in bad condition. Sometimes it’s the only example you will ever find.

You know that I (as a hoarder, preserver of boxes, and mutant toy collector) agree with the Kovels. Don’t throw that out!

But this also reminded me of the expression, Dead as a Dodo, (and the similar or related Dumb as a Dodo, also discussed in Kovels June 14, 2007 newsletter), and of a conversation we had with the children just this past weekend.

We were discussing silent films and how many of these old films are gone forever because Hollywood actually reused the film. A combination of both conscious act (trying to save money by reusing celluloid) and ignorance (who knew that films which were no longer wanted by theaters would have any value?), film was recycled and thus we no longer have many of the old silent movies. The girls couldn’t fathom a universe in which movies and its related memorabilia weren’t valued and so they struggled with the concept, if not the actual losses in cinema history.

So Derek compared this to the original Disney animation cels which were dipped (just as Roger Rabbit et all feared!) so that the acetate could be reused for new animated films. This hit them hard, of course.

But all of this brings up the matter of technology. While Collin discusses, correctly, that vinyl has a short life and that one ought to preserve recordings digitally, what other advances render objects, collectibles, obsolete — as dead as Dodos?

Michael Sporn was similarly prompted by Dodos. Seeing the January 22, 2007, issue of The New Yorker, Sporn blogged:

This made me wonder if hand-drawn animation is going to go a similar way. Will they be able to find the bones a hundred years from now? Evidence seen in the past five years or so seems to give me little reason to doubt that it would be gone. MoCap will get better and the guise of animation will be front and center for the obvious future. There’s a good chance tomorrow will show us two of three nominees for Oscar’s Best Animated Feature will be Motion Capture. The animator as we knew it is virtually dead.

Still thinking of the issue, a week later Sporn revisited the issue with a deeper discussion of Motion Capture animation.

If technology threatens to render things obsolete, what will we do with all those things? They should be stored — and properly. But as recently as the 1960’s Warner Brothers destroyed nearly all the animation art they had in storage simply because they had no room for it. What will become of the things which exist now?

It is said that the Dodo died was because they were 1) fearless of people; 2) pushed out, made homeless, by humans cutting down their forest homes in the name of progress; and 3) flightless, so they laid their eggs on the ground where dogs, pigs and other critters ate them, dwindling their numbers.

As collectors we should learn from this.

We should be ‘afraid’ of what careless people will do with ‘obsolete’ objects. We should be sure to consider storage matters, make sure there will always be homes for items of value. And we should never leave our ‘babies’ where the ‘pigs’ can dwindle their numbers.