Collect Canada's 1953-57 Wildlife Stamps
by John Burnett (ENY3)
Originally published in Linns Stamp News (slightly edited here for younger readers)
At some time in our lives every stamp collector has someone to suggest what might be a neat collection to create. As a young man in the 1950's I started collecting the First day covers, (the envelopes that are mailed or cancelled on the first day of use of a particular stamp), of the wildlife issue from Canada. My dad suggested these because I could buy them at the post office from my allowance.
In mounting up my stamps and making a small write up (writing about the animal pictured on the stamp) I learned that a lot of these animals were endangered, that is they were being pushed from their lands and were in danger of being eliminated from the world. The stamps are pictured in Figure 1.
Each stamp is in one color, this is referred to as monochrome and each stamp is engraved, this is the manner in which the picture was created for the stamp.
Figure 1 - Canada definitive format engraved monochrome Wildlife series of 1953-1956.
Each stamp is small, except for the Whooping Crane stamp which is the size of a regular commemorative stamp.
It was the Whooping Crane stamp that got my juices flowing! When I first looked up Whooping Cranes I found that there were only 27 birds left in the world. Today I am glad to say that we have a few hundred birds and the population is growing. This bird is majestic and was nearly wiped off the face of the earth. Perhaps stamp collecting has helped save the Whooping Crane by making people like me recognize the trouble the bird was in!
Figure 2 shows a plate block, that is, four stamps from the corner of the sheet with plate information on the edge, called the selvedge. This information often tells you the printers name, the stamp designer's name, and the plate number.
The stamp pictures the Loon and the block of four stamps has one stamp with a constant variety, which is a speck in the water just in front of the Loon.
Figure 2 - A top left inscription and plate block of four of the 1957 Loon stamp the final in the wildlife series.
Here are just a few ideas for collecting stamps. You could collect stamps with animals on them such as this series of stamps from Canada.
Canada has produced many more stamps with animals pictured on them so you can make a really good collection from them. You could elect to collect blocks of stamps, they could be used stamps, or they could be unused stamps (we call them mint stamps).
I think it is really fun to learn something about what is pictured on the stamp, what should we know about that animal? Why did this country put that animal on a stamp? In a future article we will explore collecting the stamps on an envelope.
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