COEUR d'ALENE - To (mostly) ensure the blue heron statue never leaves again, Eva Itskos, co-owner of the Olympia restaurant, wants to buy it.

It just needs a little help.

The restaurant has until June - when the public art piece is scheduled to rotate out with the revolving display's 14 other pieces - to raise enough to buy it.

"We're halfway there," Itskos said about the cash raising campaign, which started this week.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so when the bird was ripped off its perch and stolen in October, Itskos' heart pounded with all kinds of missing it. And after a month's worth of public pleas for its return, it was dropped off in front of the restaurant in the middle of the night.

Before it flies away in June when the new crop of art replaces this year's bunch, Itskos wants to own the $3,000 statue outright.

She put in $500. The artist, Rick Davis, chipped in $250, and the city knocked off the commission amount should it sell, leaving $1,500 to raise, said Joseph Sharnetsky, the arts commission member who created the city's inaugural ArtCurrents program.

Hanging inside the restaurant on the corner of Third Street and Lakeside Avenue is a poster updating the fundraising totals, and on the counter sits a change container to drop off, you know, change.

"We need 1,500 people to give us a dollar each," Itskos said.

Even if they don't have enough come June, the restaurant owners will "reassess" the situation, Itskos said. Anything to keep it put.

That's what absence does to a heart, after all.