Even Bower birds get the blues

I woke up today thinking about bower birds. Why? What rational adult opens their eyes in the morning wondering about small, blue birds? Mmmm... maybe the word rational is the clue there. And what was exercising my mind about these creatures? Well you see the male bower bird birds builds a nest on the ground, a bower if you will, and then decorates it to attract a mate. The female bower birds then go house hunting, choose the bower which is most to their liking and after checking outthe male's dancing ability, settles in and lays eggs. Fine, the thing is the most favoured decoration is bits of blue plastic, milk bottle tops, drinking straws, ballpoint pens and clothes pegs. Bower birds are notorious, in some areas, for taking every blue peg, and ONLY the blue pegs from the baskets on people's clothes lines. Why do I wake up fretting about this? Well it struck me that we white people have only been bringing the benefits of civilisation to Australia for a little over two hundred years and the previous tenants were suprisingly neglectful about flinging lumps of blue plastic about the joint (some people just don't care about the wildlife). So, with what did these birds decorate their nests before we thoughtfully started distributing blue plastic around the landscape. When I raised this problem with my family their answer, amidst much sighing and rolling of eyes, was 'Don't be stupid, they used berries or flowers' before running off. Really, how hard can it be to get ready for school. I may be wrong but Australia seems to be remarkable for the lack of native blue flora. Sure they're everywhere now but if you ask they are all introduced, none were here before white invasion settlement and even if they were how long does a berry or a flower last once it's picked and placed on the ground? How impressive would a pile of rotting vegetation be as a place to have your family? No, the birds must have used something else but what? Maybe they were quite content to use whatever was available until they first saw blue and then developed an obsession with it, I don't know. I hope you weren't hoping to find an answer at the end of this post because I don't have one. Don't forget, I lose sleep worrying about this and I hope that you will too until we find an answer.