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Spark Bird: Thomas Poulsom and the LEGO Robin
Building one bird out of LEGO bricks led to many more.
© Thomas Poulsom
As he trained to be an arborist, Thomas Poulsom started developing two new interests: birds and building with LEGO bricks. After first building a European Robin, he went on to create LEGO models of more than 75 species. Thomas became one of the first LEGO fans to have his designs produced as an official set.
BirdNote®
Spark Bird: Thomas Poulsom and the LEGO Robin
By Mark Bramhill
This is BirdNote.
[Birdsong]
As he trained to be an arborist, Thomas Poulsom started developing two new interests. The first was birds:
Thomas Poulsom: My favorite bird is a robin, robin red-breast in Europe.
[European Robin song]
Thomas Poulsom: Because when you're digging, a little robin is always following you around looking for food. Worms and grubs and all sorts of things that you're digging up.
The other was building with LEGO bricks, after a "dark age" away from the toy while at university. And then Thomas found these interests colliding.
Thomas Poulsom: I wanted to build something related to my work. And I had a Eureka moment, which was a robin landing on my fork handle.
[European Robin song]
Thomas Poulsom: So I thought right, I'm gonna build a robin out of LEGO.
After building that European Robin, he built more bird models — and a name for himself in the LEGO community. To date, he's made more than 75 species! And in 2015, Thomas was one of the first LEGO fans to have his designs produced as an official set. It included a Blue Jay, a hummingbird, and of course, a robin.
Thomas Poulsom: I was really chuffed. And I was invited to a LEGO store in London, and people were queuing up to get me to sign the box and everything. It was very surreal, an extremely proud moment of my life.
[European Robin song]
To see pictures of Thomas's delightful bird models, go to our website, BirdNote.org. I'm Mark Bramhill.
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Senior Producer: Mark Bramhill
Producer: Sam Johnson
Managing Producer: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Ariana Remmel
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. European Robin ML89108201 recorded by Dominic Garcia-Hall, and European Robin ML162860 recorded by G Budney.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2023 BirdNote October 2023 & November 2025
Narrator: Mark Bramhill
ID# sparkbird-24-2023-10-18 sparkbird-24
Mark Bramhill
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