You might remember the wonderful #21301 LEGO Ideas Birds sets from 2015, originally designed by British LEGO fan Thomas Poulsom. Thomas later released a book with even more bird models, titled Birds from Bricks, which we talked about here: New Book with More LEGO Ideas Birds. The same year, LEGO released another birds set, called the #4002014 LEGO Hub Birds, which was a gift to LEGO employees for Christmas, and we talked about here: LEGO Ideas Birds Review & More! 🙂
The birds in the above-mentioned two sets and book are beautiful, very detailed, and make wonderful display models. However, since these birds are quite large, you would need a good number of pieces to design and build your own birds on the same scale. I recently ran across the work of Alan Mann, another LEGO fan who designs birds, but on a much smaller scale. The macaw, pictured above, is only about three times larger than the minifig-scale parrot that comes in many LEGO sets, and is made up of less than thirty commonly available pieces. If you would like to build your own, Alan even provides instructions, which you can find below.
Even at this small scale, Alan’s little macaw is very detailed and instantly recognizable. And the macaw not the only bird Alan designed. There is also a heron, a mallard, an owl, and a vulture in the collection – all made of just a few pieces, but with surprisingly accurate details. While Alan didn’t provide instructions for these birds as of yet, you should be able to build them just from the pictures. You can find larger versions of the images at Alan’s flickr gallery.
While large LEGO models are very impressive and fun to build, it is nice to sometimes work on a small scale, taking advantage of the interesting shapes and colors a handful of small pieces can provide. I encourage to give these birds a try, and even make your own versions! Even just changing some of the colors can create more variety, as many birds have similar shapes. A green macaw and blue macaw would be nice!
What do you think? How do you like these small LEGO birds? Are you planning to copy some of the designs to make your own? What other birds you think would look good at this small scale? Feel free to share your thoughts and own designs in the comment section below! 😉
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Very nice, a friend of mine likes birds a lot, but doesn’t have much bricks, so he will definetely like it!
Yeah, they are great. I have already made several parrots myself. 🙂
What a nice little build! I’m definitely going to make the macaw, and probably the other ones too! Thanks for posting.
You’re very welcome! 🙂
Adorable! Will definitely build these! Great little gifts for birthday parties too! Or they could be used for fun activities at kids’ events. Any chance the other will have instructions?
Those are great ideas! I haven’t seen the instructions posted for the other birds, but you should be able to figure them out, as so few parts are used. If you would like to have building instructions available for parties, you can recreate the birds in LEGO Digital Designer, and print them out. And, you can always ask Alan, if he would be so kind to make them. 🙂
There’s some SNOT-techniques in a few builds, such as the toucan, that seem a bit complicated to figure out…
My friend had found a couple of this polybag through another friend, and gave two copies to me. (Later an additional one through a birthday fishing game.) Anyway, despite the small size, it needed a bit of thinking and analyzing, wrapping my mind around the construction.
https://brickset.com/sets/NEX271712-1/Clay
You know, the game where you throw a line with a clothespin behind some towel, and some adult attaches some goodie bag behind the towel…
The kids were meant to be prioritized, but he had so many polybags that they actually ran out of kids after a while…
I never heard of that game, but it sounds fun! Looks like I missed out! 🙄
Maybe it’s more of a Scandinavian thing…
I actually make that a game with small sets; trying to put them together without instructions, and see how far I can go. It’s a good challenge! 😀
Thanks for sharing these! We have a lot of loose lego, so building these birds would be a perfect weekend activity. Our boys may even be inspired to make their own!
Oh, yes! Many birds have similar shapes, so your children can definitely use the designs here as a template to make different kinds of birds! 😀
Nicely done, especially on such a small scale. And he didn’t even use those printed eye pieces!
I didn’t even consider that, but yeah, you are right; those new eye pieces have been a great way to bring small builds alive, and Alan managed to do without them.
It’s a great way to have a parrot and not having to clean out the Cage,LOL!
LOL! That’s funny! 😀
Funny to see this just after I built a bird yesterday! 😀 After that, I’m super impressed by these – they’re so recognizable! A perfect scale for them. The in situ photographs are great too.
I was very impressed too. I have been thinking about how small birds could be built that are still recognizable since I built the LEGO Ideas Birds set. I wasn’t that they still looked so good in such a small scale. 🙂