All posts by Gilly Christmas

Previous Editor of Flight. BSS website developer. Live in Hampshire, England. Been a BSS member since 1999. Collecting Interests: Worldwide birds excluding cartoons and stylised birds. Mint only; Selected issues from Stamperija countries. I am excluding doves and poultry from 2020 to try to reduce purchases! I have 3 subsets of stamp albums: a) Paintings with birds; b) Doves, and c) Roosters. Favourite bird stamp countries: All South American countries; Antigua & Barbuda; All Channel Islands; French Antarctic Territory; Falkland Islands; Gambia; Korea (N & S); Malaysia; Namibia; Singapore; South Africa; Sweden and Ukraine. I particularly like Souvenir Sheets, Mini Sheets, and Overprinted stamps. Would be interested in communicating with members with similar collecting interests, and/or meeting with members living within/near Hampshire.
New Issues

Recent Bird Stamps from Bosnia Herzegovina (BH Pošta)

Leave a comment

Prosecuting Peacocks?

One of the consequences of the Coronavirus situation is that I am spending more time at home than I might otherwise do, primarily to “keep safe”.  Naturally, this is proving difficult to do, because I am eager to explore the county of Dumfries and Galloway, which is now my new home. 

I was sifting through my new bird stamps from Bosnia Herzegovina that had just arrived, when on the radio, I hear a story about five peacocks that have roamed the village of Henfield (West Sussex). The police had allegedly threatened these peacocks with death, following complaints from some villagers about the impact of the peacocks on gardens and property.  A rival group have got together to save the birds from extinction and to provide a more permanent home, to avoid them roaming the streets and gardens of the village. Ordinarily I would not have been at home to hear such a story.  Coincidentally, one of the stamps that I had in front of me when the radio blared out this story was the 27 March 2020 BH Pošta issue of a peacock (Pavo cristatus) in a miniature sheet format, as below:

Continue Reading

Stamps

Incongruous Issues

Leave a comment

The IGPC website does offer a few opportunities to explore what I have termed incongruous bird stamp issues.  Some of these are reviewed in this article.

Inca Tern (Larosterna inca)

On 16 May 2019, Guyana issued a set of five stamps that celebrated the Inca Tern.  Both the souvenir sheet, which features the $800 value; and the four stamps printed in a second sheet (with values of $100, $300, $500 and $700) are impressive in the design and quality of the photographic images.  A worthy addition to the global catalogue of bird stamps, I would have thought.

But there is, of course, a clue in the title.  The American Bird Conservancy website – where the Inca Tern featured as bird of the week back in 18 July 2014 – describes the usual habitat of this bird as being along the Western edge of South America, from Peru all the way down to Chile.  Its territorial range doesn’t stray much beyond that coast. That is because its natural food source is in the cold waters of the Humboldt [or Peru] Current that flows northwards from the South Pacific Ocean up the Western coastline of South America.

Continue Reading

New Issues

Andean Cock-of-the-Rock (Rupicola Peruvianus)

Leave a comment

Browsing through the New Issues catalogue that I receive quarterly from Yvert & Tellier, I came across this new definitive stamp issued by Serpost, the postal authority for Peru, featuring the Andean Cock-of-the-Rock (Rupicola Peruvianus).

There is an immediate curiosity about this stamp: in the Yvert new issues catalogue, on the left-hand side of the stamp is the name of the printer (CARTOR) and the printing date (2019). 

On the right-hand margin is a serial number: 06062. The stamps featured both on the free stamp catalogue website and on the bird theme website also share these characteristics.  In contracts, the images below, from the official Serpost website, don’t show these features.  That may just be a characteristic of the publicity information issued by Serpost for this stamp, both of the stamp and of the First Day Cover (dated 13 January 2020).    

The stamp value at 1.20 Sols is worth around £0.26, which makes me wonder if this is a make up value or has a particular postal use on its own.  Unfortunately, the tariff pages on Serpost are not available as I write this article, so I will have to do some follow up research later.

To read Steven’s full article, click here