I always understood the bluebirds to be fantastic birds along the lines of the Firebird and the phoenix, based on Maeterlink's (spelling doesn't look right) play. Unlike the misidentified birds in the country garden song. Or the robin in Mary Poppins.

As a bit of thread creep, I once read a book by an American female author set in medieval England, in which a woman killed a ground squirrel for dinner. Amusingly, she then proceeded to make as much use of it as if it were the ground sloth from Crystal Palace park, or indeed the Derby Ram. Which would have been OK, had the species been indigenous. Strangely, I never felt like that about Twain's Yankee...

Penny