Lickable Art: Stamps Showcase Wildlife
& Wilderness
by Howard Youth
"Elephants
are lovely animals," says Mary Ann Owens, "I've
seen them in the wild in Africa and Asia." But 70-year-old
Owens sees far more of these animals in New York, where her
Brooklyn apartment is filled with elephant mementos, from
candles and bookends to teapots and clocks. All other pachyderm
paraphernalia aside, Owens most treasures her extensive collection
of elephant stamps.
They became an obsession, Owens recalls, "when my husband came home one day with some stamps and said, 'Here's something different in elephants!'" Several thousand stamps and 30 years later, Owens owns one of the largest elephant stamp collections in the world. "I buy all elephant stamps as they come out. I've got to the point where I can't go any further," she says. She even has the first elephant stamp ever issued--an 1890 stamp from the now-defunct Indian state of Bamra. She has traveled the globe, vying against other philatelists in international stamp competitions, and winning three "large golds," the prized medals awarded to philatelists with the most unified and best-formatted presentations of stamps and their history. One day, Owens says, she intends to write the definitive book on elephant stamps.
Owens is not alone in her zeal for collecting animal stamps. Philately, or stamp collecting, has been a popular hobby since the first adhesive postal stamp was issued in Britain in 1840. And animals have been featured on stamps for almost as long. Owens is one of thousands of serious philatelists who collect only wildlife stamps. There are plenty of choices. As biodiversity is increasingly threatened, animal diversity on stamps multiplies, reflecting a strong public interest in wildlife and conservation.
"You could safely say that the majority of countries have issued wildlife stamps at one time or another," says Alan Hanks, an insect stamp collector and editor of Biophilately, a journal for animal philatelists. Many countries manufacture stamps as a quick source of revenue, banking on philatelists who collect by topic and search out exotic stamps. In addition, U.S. federal and state duck stamps, required for hunting licenses, have also caught collectors's attention. Together, the stamps and their admirers share a colorful history closely tied with efforts to increase environmental awareness.
Animals on U.S. Stamps
On
March 20, 1923, a buffalo quietly made history. The stoic,
humped animal stood on a dusty plain, its massive head turned
to gaze at nearby observers. It still stands there today,
forever frozen on the face of a sepia-colored 30-cent postage
stamp. This was the first U.S. stamp to feature a wildlife
subject. Two earlier stamps, from the late 1800s, had depicted
wildlife-a bald eagle adorning the U.S. coat of arms and a
buffalo being hunted by an Indian on horseback-but the animals
in these stamps were ancillary. The 1923 stamp, with the buffalo
as its primary graphic, marked the beginning of a rich tradition
of U.S. stamps with wildlife themes.
The National Zoo played a part in launching this historic stamp, although that role has been disputed. In a 1923 bulletin, Third Assistant Postmaster General W. Irving Glover noted that the stamp depicted "a buffalo taken from a photograph." The photograph in question was snapped at the Smithsonian, probably in the Arts and Industries Building. The old black-and-white print shows a group of buffalo that had been shot and mounted by William Temple Hornaday, chief taxidermist for the Smithsonian's National Museum, who became a conservationist and successfully pushed to establish the National Zoo in 1889. One of the buffaloes appears to have the same stance as the stamp buffalo.
However, the stamp's artist, C. R. Knight, remembered things differently. He claimed he drew his subject from life--at the National Zoo. In a letter dated November 3, 1939, Knight explained: "A certain Mr. Baldwin, an engraver for the Bureau [of Engraving and Printing], was trying to make a drawing from the Museum group when I offered to do this for him. Only too gladly he hustled me over to the Bureau and I was commissioned to do the drawing, which I promptly did--from the Zoo specimen."
The buffalo stamp did not carry an obvious conservation message. The only type accompanying the art reads: "United States Postage, 30 Cents." However, the buffalo, then as now, symbolized the vanishing Wild West, and also the beginning of efforts to save endangered species. The buffalo, once one of the continent's most abundant animals, became one of the first endangered species after it was hunted to near extinction by the late 1800s.
Following that initial wildlife stamp, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) issued a series of stamps dedicated to U.S. national parks, from Acadia to Zion, in 1934. In 1947, a stamp celebrating the new Everglades National Park was issued, complete with an etching of a great white heron--an all-white subspecies of the great blue heron found only in southern Florida and the Caribbean.
The first U.S. postage stamps labeled "Wildlife Conservation" appeared in 1956. These three-cent stamps presented three animals wildlife biologists had struggled diligently to save--the wild turkey, pronghorn antelope, and king salmon. While these stamps, like recent wildlife-themed stamps, may not have raised funds to benefit wildlife efforts directly, they carried the conservation message around the country. By 1956, the turkey, the continent's largest game bird, was well on its way to recovery after being all but wiped out by unregulated hunting. Today, after years of restocking and careful hunting regulations, the bird once again haunts forests and fields over most of its historic range. The pronghorn, decimated from a historic 30 million to about 13,000 by the 1800s, has also bounced back thanks to careful conservation. More than 400,000 of these speedy mammals now live in western North America. The story of the king salmon has not been so rosy: The continent's largest salmon is now one of the rarest because dams have blocked many from migrating from the ocean to their spawning streams upriver.
Fast on the heels of these popular stamps came a fourth three-cent stamp that featured one of the country's most endangered species, the whooping crane. On July 19, 1957, four months before the stamp was issued, the Washington Post reported that the whooping crane population stood at 31, "the highest it's been since 1950, when 34 were counted." Today, following decades of cooperative efforts between U.S. and Canadian conservationists, the wild whooping crane population has grown to around 180, although the bird remains one of the continent's rarest species.
The crane stamp had another distinction. "This is one of the first times more than one color was used on a stamp," said Cecilia Hatfield Wertheimer, curator of the Historical Resource Center at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Unlike previous monochrome wildlife stamps, the whooper stamp sported three colors--blue for water, green for grasses, and orange for the two fuzzy whooping crane chicks. Fine engraving embellished the drawing done by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) artist Bob Hines. Today, most stamps are printed in full color, the artwork scanned onto a computer that digitally generates four-color film. The film negatives are exposed on photosensitive plates--offset printing plates--which each print a different color. A flexible and popular method, offset printing produces bright stamps that lack the fine-lined etching characteristic of engraved stamps. Engraving, a painstaking and dying art, is now employed only on a few commemorative, limited-edition stamps such as the Spanish-American War stamp issued in March 1998 and the Pacific '97 stamp issued in 1997.
As the environment and wildlife became hotter topics, more wildlife stamps rolled off the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing's presses. Highlights from the 1960s included a 1963 stamp honoring pioneer bird painter John James Audubon, a 1966 stamp commemorating the 50-year anniversary of the Migratory Bird Treaty, and a waterfowl conservation stamp issued in 1968 that pictures a pair of flying wood ducks. Since the 1970s, dozens of wildlife stamps have been issued by the USPS, including blocks of stamps dedicated to coral reefs, state birds and flowers, mammals, hummingbirds, and owls. Among the most recent releases was a 1996 series of stamps featuring photographs of endangered species, ranging from the Wyoming toad to the West Indian manatee. Upcoming stamps include a set of four tropical birds that will be released by August.
Collectors' Zeal and a Problem of Plenty
The United
States, however, does not corner the market on animal stamps.
For example, Canada's very first stamp, issued in 1851, portrayed
a beaver. Other early wildlife stamps include an 1866 Peruvian
stamp depicting llamas and an 1879 Guatemalan stamp depicting
the resplendent quetzal, that country's national bird. In
his 1936 book The Animals on Postage Stamps, O.W. Barrett
tallied about 90 countries that had issued stamps portraying
80 or more types of animals, and there are far more today.
So how many wildlife stamps are out there? Probably too many to count safely. "Nobody collects all animal stamps now because the volume is so huge," says George Griffenhagen, editor of Topical Time, the journal of the American Topical Association or ATA, an international 7,000-member organization of philatelists who collect stamps by areas of interest. Griffenhagen points out that the ATA ranks the popularity of topics every two to four years, and over the past 20 years of surveys, mammals, birds, insects, and marine life have been among the hottest collector topics.
Just keeping track of the world's fish stamps is a daunting task, according to Victor Springer, a curator of ichthyology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and an ardent philatelist. "When I became an ichthyologist [in 1957]," says Springer, "I began to throw stamps in a box." Now Springer has a huge collection. He co-authored a book with chemist Maynard Raasch that lists all of the world's fish stamps through 1991. The two scientist-cum-philatelists counted a total of 9,700 fish stamps, and have added about 700 or so more since publication. Springer has about 7,000 of these in his collection. Some of his stamps even reflect his scientific accomplishments: One Cayman Islands stamp depicts a fish he first described (Malacoctenus boehlkei) and a St. Helena stamp portrays a fish named after him (Scartella springeri).
The seemingly endless stream of international wildlife stamps has been a mixed blessing for philatelists. "Stamp collecting has been ruined to a great extent by countries issuing large numbers of stamps each year," Springer says. With stamp collectors in mind, many developing nations produce stamps for the foreign collector market. Some philatelists disdainfully call them "wallpaper stamps." "These countries grind out stamps at such a fast rate, they're not taking much care," says Griffenhagen. Keen philatelists find plenty of incorrectly labeled stamps these days. While mismatched animal names and misidentifications dismay philatelists, they also challenge them. "You begin to get into it and you look at biology books and read," says Griffenhagen. "You ask, 'Are they accurate in their identification? Which subspecies is this?'"
The uneasiness among philatelists over "wallpaper stamps" is not new. O.W. Barrett alluded to this in 1936, when he wrote that the printing of wildlife stamps "not only tends to increase [the countries'] stamp sales but it also 'advertises' the countries by conveying fixed impressions of their faunas." Barrett then asked whether or not these stamps were "educational propaganda." The same criticisms have been aimed at U.S. stamps in recent years. Many philatelists believe the USPS is pandering to popular whims by issuing pretty bird or dinosaur stamps while forsaking traditional, more patriotic stamp subjects. The tide of wildlife stamps, however, shows no sign of ebbing. Governments issue stamps that will sell both to mailers and collectors, and wildlife-themed stamps are continually popular. For example, the amount of money spent by collectors--or retained by the USPS instead of going toward letter delivery--for the 1996 endangered species stamps is about $11 million, which is on par with other popular 15-stamp blocks.
Stamps: A Duck's Best Friend
Philatelists do not focus solely on postal stamps. Some collect revenue stamps, which charge buyers taxes or fees for certain goods or activities. Years ago, for example, the United States issued revenue stamps for goods such as beer, wine, and playing cards. But the most beautiful and collected revenue stamps are federal duck stamps, which hunters must buy and afix to their annual hunting permits.
The United States began the world's first duck stamp program in 1934, after North American waterfowl populations had plummeted to an all-time low due to unregulated hunting and habitat destruction. Each year, all adult U.S. waterfowl hunters must purchase a $15 duck stamp. Annually, more than 1.5 million stamps are sold. About 90 percent are purchased by hunters, but the remaining 10 percent are bought by collectors and wildlife refuge visitors. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service collects this money and deposits 98 percent of it into the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund, which is used to buy refuge lands for waterfowl and other wildlife. (The remaining two percent is given to the USPS, which sells and distributes many of the stamps and pays the Bureau of Engraving and Printing for the design and printing of the stamps.) Since the program began in 1934, the USFWS has collected about $500 million from duck stamp sales, which has been used to purchase about five million acres of national wildlife refuge--an area the size of Massachusetts.
At least 16 other countries have started duck stamp programs in the last 15 years or so, although none has enjoyed the success of the U.S. program. Only a few other countries, notably Canada, Great Britain, Mexico, and New Zealand, require their hunters to purchase the conservation stamps. Other countries print the stamps more for sales to collectors than as a wildlife conservation tool. In addition to national programs, many U.S. states, Canadian provinces, and some Native American tribes issue hunting stamps that raise money for local wildlife areas. California began the first state program in 1971; three-quarters of the U.S. states now have their own programs, including Maryland and Virginia.
Each year, hundreds of eager wildlife artists submit waterfowl paintings to the annual Federal Duck Stamp Contest, the only U.S. government-sponsored art competition. The actual award for winning the annual duck stamp competition, a frame with a sheet of the artist's duck stamps inside, may seem humble, but it comes with the promise of money and fame for the winning artist. According to a press release issued by the USFWS, "winning artists stand to gain hundreds of thousands of dollars through the sale of limited-edition prints and licensed products bearing the image of their designs."
The first open contest was held in 1949. Since then, the accuracy and detail of the duck stamp paintings have steadily improved, from one-color, etched "vintage era" stamps to the full-color portraits, such as the 1998 stamp that pictures a male Barrow's goldeneye.
Whether bought for postage, for hunting, or for collecting, wildlife stamps have a broad appeal. "Birds and flowers and things like that continue to be very popular with the American public," says the U.S. Postal Service's senior art director Terry McCaffrey. The art, colors, and animals on wildlife stamps draw attention, and drive home the conservation message, even at the highest levels of collecting. When asked if wildlife stamp collectors value the importance of saving the animals they collect in miniature, Mary Ann Owens answers, absolutely. "Competition judges require a logical conclusion to exhibits. In most flora and fauna exhibits these days, the last chapter is conservation."
Howard Youth, formerly associate editor of ZooGoer, is a freelance writer specializing in wildlife conservation issues.
(ZooGoer 27(4) 1998. Copyright 1998 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.)
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