The Airfix Wildlife Series: six life-size birds, 1976 to 1984

If you had one of these as a child, it’s probably still in a loft somewhere: a life-size bird on a branch, built and painted to sit on a shelf and be looked at. We made six of them between 1976 and 1984, and when they left the range, they stayed gone for the better part of forty years. The tooling didn’t go with them though, and four of the original six are back in 2026, moulded from the same tooling that made them the first time.

What was the Wildlife Series?

Six kits, all of them moulded at 1:1 scale. Our 13th edition catalogue introduced the range in 1976 in a single sentence: “Life-size birds in a display setting is the theme of a new series of wildlife items with an educational background.” Most kits hand you the subject; however, these gave you the bird and its setting: a log, a branch or a tree stump moulded as part of the kit.

What you ended up with was a scene rather than a single model on a plinth. The educational background wasn’t a slogan either; the bullfinches came with a full-colour leaflet on the birds’ migratory habits, and the Little Owl came with notes on the species and where it lives.

The six kits, and when each appeared

*A word on those years, because you may well be holding a box while you read this. Sources disagree by a year on several of the kits, and they disagree for a reason: some record the catalogue a kit first appeared in, others the year it was issued. The order the range came out in isn’t in doubt, but individual years sometimes are, and wherever the two readings differ we’ve gone with the catalogues themselves.

Series 3 to Series 6: a range that was growing

We sorted our kits into series by size and price back then, and the birds didn’t stay where they started. If you’re checking yours, Bullfinches and Blue Tits went out in Series 3, the modest end of the catalogue at the time. The Robins started there too and were promoted to Series 4 when it was renumbered, which usually meant a price rise. And the Little Owl, arriving last of all, went straight into Series 6, the largest box in the range at 31 parts.

1981: the company failed, not the range

The range did not fail. The company did. Airfix Industries peaked in the mid-1970s at roughly 75% of the UK market and around 20 million kits a year, having bought Meccano and Dinky in 1971 to become the largest toy company in Britain. That scale turned out to be the problem, because the divisions depended on one another, and the interdependence forced the business to declare bankruptcy in 1981. General Mills bought it through Palitoy, moved tooling to Calais, and UK market share fell to around 40%.

The birds came through all of that. Bullfinches, the Woodpecker and the Little Owl were renumbered into Series 9 and listed in the 1983 and 1984 catalogues, three years after the collapse that was supposed to have killed them. Then they stopped appearing, and no source says why. The catalogue was almost certainly rationalised in the years that followed.

What the catalogues show, kit by kit

Not all six ran for the same length of time, which matters if you’re trying to complete a set. The Bullfinches kit was listed from 1976 to 1984, the full span of the range, while the Robins kit ran from 1978 to 1982.

The robin itself has a far longer story than the kit does, and what a robin symbolises is a piece of its own.

Japan, 1999: Gunze Sangyo puts four back into production

Fifteen years after the last British listing, Gunze Sangyo put four of the kits back into production in Japan under its own numbers. Those four were GX1311 for the Kingfisher, GX1314 for the Bullfinches, GX1315 for the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker and GX1316 for the Little Owl. By 2014 you could pick one up at Hobby Link Japan for around £3.

2015: the first attempt to bring them back

We’ve been here before. On 29 May 2015 we launched KitStarter, a pre-order platform where you could vote with your wallet to bring a vintage kit back into limited production. The two launch products were the Bluetits and the Bullfinches, and Richard Ames said at the time that the platform would “enable Hornby to interact much more closely with our consumers”.

What happened next isn’t in the public record. [VERIFY: whether the 2015 KitStarter bird kits reached their pre-order threshold. Hornby internal records; Tom to check] We know the platform produced at least one kit, a Beagle Basset numbered KSA02025 in 2016.

The original tools, back in use

The 2026 kits are not new tools cut to look like old ones. They are the originals, restored, and the restoration was done here in the UK.

It went a good deal deeper than a clean. Each tool was stripped right down to its individual parts, which were washed, lubricated and repaired wherever age had told. New heaters went into the hot runners and were rewired, every insert was re-seated in its bolster with its clearances corrected, all of it intended to prevent flash. What you get for that is cleaner mouldings than a tool of this age would ever give you untouched.

Four of them are coming back rather than all six: Bullfinches, Robins, Kingfisher and Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, numbered A03830, A04830, A04831 and A04832. You’ll notice the original numbers surviving underneath the modern A prefix. We’re releasing them at an RRP of £24.99 each.

Some of the 2026 boxes draw on the original illustrations, with the style and the colours brought gently up to date. The original Robins artwork was by John Barber. The woodpecker took a different route, because its first box used a photograph of the built model rather than an illustration, so we have reworked that one to sit alongside the others.

Check out our birds range, back now as part of the Wildlife Series.