The Stamp Album

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 21, 16 April 1927, Page 20 (Supplement)

The Stamp Album

“ ORNITHOPHILATELY ”

A STUVY OF BIRDS AND OF STAMPS A series cf articles forming an excellent example ofthe educational value of stamp-collecting has been appearing in . Scott s Monthly Journal,” a popular American philatelic publication. Mr Charles Sidney Thompson, a recognised authority on ornithology, who is also an ardent philatelist, discusses in these articles many of the varieties of birds illustrated on stamps. His text is informative of habits and characteristics of birds, and sometimes of their mythological significance. The £rst instalment is reprinted here.

From a jungle of giant club mosses., towering equisetum and mighty tree ferns a bedraggled reptilian-appearing creature scrambled upward to safety, narrowly escaping the voracious appetite of a near relative; dried his dripping wings as he half perched, half clung, by the clawed fingers on the bend of his primitive pinions, and finally launched himself on an erratic and uncertain flight—the envy of his dinosaurian cousin who had so narrowly missed entertaining him at dinner. Thus, seven million years ago. Archaeopteryx, the first bird, fled the jaws of an unkind fate, wore the first feathers, and became the ancestor of a numerous and varied progeny which ever since have claimed the mastery of the air and have attracted the interest of man—the naked mammal who was to make his debut on the planet some six and a-half million years later. From the day when man first gazed on a bird until now no other group of animals has elicited so much human interest. More books have been written about birds than all other classes of vertebrate animals together. No island has been so difficult of access, or so distant, that some adventurous human has not reached it— some bird rested there. No mountain has been too high, or cliff too steep, for the ornithologist who yearned to look on the eggs of eagle or vulture. No swamp has been too deep, or too infested w>th fever, to deter the enthusiasm of the bird hunter.

It is no surprise, therefore, that so many species of birds have been pictured on postage stamps. The totems or tribal insignia of forgotten tribes, birds have become the central objects on national coats of arms; folk lore centres about many of them, while others are creatures of vast interest or superb beauty. The philatelic expression, “It’s a bird!” does not mean necessarily that the object under discussion wears feathers. It may be a superb copy of a rarity, or it may be one of those picture stamps which some of the ultranighbrows call “kid stuff” and which they buy surreptitiously under the specious and transparent excuse that they are for “my little boy”—which is figuratively if not literally true, as there is considerable little boy in even the oldest collector, especially where birds are concerned. Sling shots, air rifles and exploits in Juvenile marksmanship are all recalled by the image of some bird or animal on a stamp. Back of that is the ageold urge of the Cro-Magnon, to whom every animate object was a potential dinner. We are only a few hundred thousand years from our cave-dwelling ancestors —so why shouldn’t we be interested in the birds which appear on stamps? They permit us to re-live and re-enact the ontogeny 'of our race, and their urge should not be concealed under any Snv little boy” piffle! From the time when the first apeman appeared on the arth, birds have attracted and held attention because they can fly. They can escape by means of wings, and from Icarus to 1926 the delight of man has been in pinions. From the Greeks to moderns, humans have put the wings of birds Or. ha is—although the Hellenes conceded this privilege only to the gods, while with us it is a percular prerogative of “goddesses”! All birds, however, do not fly, nor do all of them even possess wings. The so-called tribes of the air are divided sharply into two groups, one of which possesses no volant members, nor is it likely that any member of this aggregation ever did fly. This division, containing the ostriches •nd their group relatives, is evidently very nearly related to the extinct dinosaur, and it is nothing short of startling to note the similarity between the skeletons of ostrich and dinosaur of about the same size, for it must he remembered that all “dinos” were not the gigantic saurians of the movies. Some of them were little bigger than (> fcparro*vs. Birds, as Huxley has well said, are only glorified reptiles, the only cer-tainly-distinguishing character being feathers. But the flightless birds of the struthfous, or ostrich, type are functionally flightless. Their breast bones are noi ridged or keeled to furnish attachment for flight muscles —and the breast bone of an ostrich is as flat as the chests of most flappers. Therein lies the vast difference between ostriches, cassowaries. kiwis and emus from the great majority of birds which all possess the keel, on the breastbone, that is so conspicuous on the Christmas eurkey. Even carinate, or keeled birds which did not or do not fly, like the extinct dodo and the living penguin, possess keels, and hence arc degenerate descendants of winged ancestors. Countries like Liberia and North Borneo are often accused erroneously ‘of being responsible for bird and mamma* stamps, but this is open to question. Leaving out the grotesque monstrosities alleged to represent birds on armorial beamings—which never had any prototypes on land or sea nor in the skies above —it appears that Western Australia was the first country to issue y a bird stamp, with the United States (second in place.

Taking up first the ratite birds, as ostriches and their allies are called, we find ostriches —the most ancient of existing birds—depicted on a certain stamp of Abyssinia. These birds are like the Somali ostrich Struthia molybdophanes of the scientists. A fullgrown male ostrich will weigh 200 pounds or more, so that a trio of them is quite sufficient for one stamp ! All sorts of fanciful fictions are related of the ostrich, one being that he sticks his head in the sand while a flivver goes by, or some such flight of fancy. Ostriches live where sand is scarce, as a rule, and the insertion of the head in the stony earth would presuppose the possession of a pick and shovel. Another old-bachelor tale is that only the male sits on the eggs. Father is not so henpecked, as the female takes her turn in the case of the “domesticated” ostriches anyway. So-called artists who draw magazine illustrations are generally guilty of putting four or five toes on ostnehs (“Splatter Day Evening Post” take notice), but no bird has more than tour toes and ostriches have only two — plenty to make them the most dangerous kickers among birds. Cassowaries and emus, closely related struthious birds but totally different in habitat, are shown on the stamps of several countries. Cassowaries live in the dense forests of Ceram, New Guinea, New Britain, and York Peninsula, Queensland. They are fruit eaters and without exception are totally black except the head and neck, which are bare of feathers but covered with carunculated skin like that on the neck of a turkey. In addition, some members of the group have long wattles, sometimes paired, sometimes single. The head is surmounted by a large bony helmet of casque, which apparently is for protection as the bird forces its way through the jungle. The eggs of cassowaries are among the most remarkable of natural objects. They are extremely beautiful, mammillated all over with a glassy corrugation, and are an intense and vivid bright leaf-green. North Borneo shows a cassowary, but cassowaries are not found wild in Borneo, though often kept in pens by the Malay dattos. This mistake is about as stupid as the bird itself, which has been stated to be so intelligent and so affectionate that after having been fed for 20 years by the same person it would not hesitate to peck out his eyes ! The only existing species of the emu inhabits the vast treeless plains of Australia. It is dull brown in colour and has none of the polychrome head decorations of the cassowary. The eggs are almost black in colour and in finish and size are like those of the cassowary—that is, about five inches long and three and a-half inches wide. Emus are just as stupid as cassowaries and, being sombrely coloured, are not so interesting. The emu is figured on a New South Wales stamp. It is shown also on the George head type of Australia, but as a portrait of an emu this is a very fine view of a brickyard. New Zealand shows us pictures of the kiwi, another member of the Ratitae, about as large as a hen and which is quite as wingless as its scientific name. Apteryx, signfies—(a, without and pteron, wing). The kiwi is the last surviving member of a or ce-mighty race of birds, sonie of which were 10 or 12 feet tall, with leg bones larger than those of a horse. There were 50 or 60 species of these monsters, all recently extirpated by the Maori. The remaining species is a creature of strange behaviour. Nocturnal in habit, it spends its days in a burrow, in which it lays a single enormous egg once in two years. Kiwis are now strenuously protected, and, with that strange reptilian relic the tuatara, are to be found on only a few small islands. * The only other struthious group, the rheas, are South American. They have not figured on stamps. *To be continued-!