Bluebird of happiness

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Mountain bluebird (Sialia currucoides) from North America

Origins of the bluebird as a symbol of happiness[edit]

Chinese mythology[edit]

One of the oldest examples of a blue bird in myth (found on oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty, 1766-1122 BC) is from pre-modern China, where a blue or green bird (qingniao) was the messenger bird of Xi Wangmu (the 'Queen Mother of the West'), who began life as a fearsome goddess and immortal. By the Tang dynasty (618-906 AD), she had evolved into a Daoist fairy queen and the protector/patron of "singing girls, dead women, novices, nuns, adepts and priestesses...women [who] stood outside the roles prescribed for women in the traditional Chinese family".[1] Depictions of Xi Wangmu often include a bird—the birds in the earliest depictions are difficult to identify, and by the Tang dynasty, most of the birds appear in a circle, often with three legs, as a symbol of the sun.[2] (See also: Three-legged crow)

Native American folklore[edit]


According to the Cochiti tribe, the firstborn son of Sun was named Bluebird. In the tale "The Sun's Children", from Tales of the Cochiti Indians (1932) by Ruth Benedict, the male child of the sun is named Bluebird (Culutiwa).

The Navajo identify the mountain bluebird as a spirit in animal form, associated with the rising sun. The "Bluebird Song" is sung to remind tribe members to wake at dawn and rise to greet the sun:

Bluebird said to me,
"Get up, my grandchild.
It is dawn," it said to me.



European folklore[edit]


We went from the dark night and spiritual slavery to unknown wandering – in search of the bluebird.[4]



See the German equivalent blaue Blume (blue flower).

Popular use of the idiom[edit]

The immense popularity of Maeterlinck's play probably originated the idiom in English. In 1934 this was strengthened by the popular American song "Bluebird of Happiness". Written by Sandor Harmati and Edward Heyman, it was recorded several times by Jan Peerce for RCA Victor and also by Art Mooney and His Orchestra. The lyrics "Somewhere, over the rainbow, bluebirds fly" in Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg's 1938 song for the movie Wizard of Oz is a likely allusion to the idiom as well.

In 1942, the popular song "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover" used them, despite an absence of real blue birds on those cliffs, among other imagery to lift spirits.




A scene in the Disney film The Rescuers uses the bluebird as a symbol of "faith ... you see from afar."

The bluebird is featured in the song "Be Like The Bluebird" in the popular musical Anything Goes.


It is also mentioned in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya episode "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya part III".


The bluebird is mentioned at the end of the 1968 Beatles movie Yellow Submarine, when the leader of the Blue Meanies claims that his "cousin is the bluebird of happiness". Beatles bassist and lead singer Paul McCartney ended up writing a song about them for his band Wings’ 1973 album Band on the Run, the third track, "Bluebird".

The bluebird is also mentioned by David Bowie in the song "Lazarus" from his album Blackstar.

The 2001 film K-Pax, directed by Iain Softley, written by Charles Leavitt, based on a book by Gene Brewer contains a scene in which the lead character Prot played by Kevin Spacey claiming to be a visitor from outer space ends up in a psychiatric ward where he 'prescribes' a fellow patient with the task of finding a 'Bluebird Of Happiness'. In another scene the fellow patient excitedly yells out that he finally found the Bluebird, resulting in pandemonium amongst patients spanning several floors of the institution.

Bluebirds in nature[edit]

Three species of blue-headed North American thrushes (Turdidae) occupy the genus Sialia. The most widespread and best-known is the eastern bluebird (Sialia sialis), breeding from Canada's prairie provinces to Texas and from the Maritimes to Florida; discrete populations of this species are also found from southeastern Arizona through west Mexico into Guatemala and Nicaragua. The mountain bluebird (S. currucoides) breeds on high-elevation plains from central Alaska to Arizona and New Mexico, and the western bluebird (S. mexicana) inhabits dry coniferous forests from extreme southwestern Canada to Baja California and from the Great Basin south into west Mexico. Other all-blue birds in North and Central America are the blue mockingbird, blue bunting, indigo bunting, blue grosbeak and a number of jays, including the blue jay.

Europe has only a few birds with conspicuous blue in the plumage, including the great tit (Parus major), the various blue tits of the genus (Cyanistes) and the common kingfisher. The adult male of the blue rock-thrush is the only European passerine with all-blue plumage; this species is best known from its literary treatment by Giacomo Leopardi, whose poem Il passero solitario makes of the rock-thrush a figure of the poet's isolation.[7]

In South and Southeast Asia, the fairy-bluebirds, blue whistling thrush and verditer flycatcher are strikingly blue.

Poems mentioning bluebirds[edit]

The world rolls round,—mistrust it not,—
Befalls again what once befell;
All things return, both sphere and mote,
And I shall hear my bluebird's note,
And dream the dream of Auburn dell.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, May-Day, 1867

And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens how joyous we
found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper
Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped
books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander
the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of
cultivate the lost art of Lying.

— Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 1891


  3. ^ Rea, 2008: Wings in the Desert.
  5. ^ Duggan, Anne E.; Haase, Donald; Callow, Helen J., eds. (2016). Folktales and Fairy Tales: Traditions and Texts from around the World. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 1610692543. 
  6. ^ Henry Rose, Maeterlinck's Symbolism. The Blue Bird and other essays., Dodd Mead & Co., 1911