Southern Sights

Lets head for the southern seas where it is believed Royal Penguins spend most of their time somewhere between Australia and Antarctica but here they have moved ashore. The photograph is by the ornithologist Gavin Johnstone (1941-1987) who wintered one year on Macquarie Island  to study Giant Petrels and this same island is also one of the main breeding sites for Royal Penguins.

2007: World Wildlife Fund: Royal Penguins

Royal Penguins get their name from the those cute, if slightly unruly, yellow plumes which meet on their forehead, it takes several years for them to fully develop.

1988: Australia New Zealand Bicentenary Joint Issue

When night falls perhaps it is time for a koala and a kiwi to sit around a campfire. Roland Harvey an illustrator of children's book is the artist and he says he has always loved the outdoors so I think he would enjoy taking a mug of tea with these two while the billy can bubbles away.

1988: Definitive Series 1 -  'Living Together'

Australia's bicentennial year also saw the issue of three series of definitive stamps with a variety of subjects about living in Australia and drawn by a variety of artists. Of course my favourite is the one showing the postal services. Even on a magic flying stamp the postie isn't safe from dogs!  The stamp illustrator is Peter Viska who started out as a cartoonist but then turned to children's books, his first  being the children's chants and rhymes ' Far Out, Brussel Sprout' and the very Australian 'All Right, Vegemite'.

Here are some other things you might see flying around in Australia

1979: Australian Birds

although this set issued from 1978/9 shows the birds each in their unique nests. The artist is one of Australia's foremost wildlife artists, Kay Breeden Williams (b1939) whose work can be seen in many wildlife guides.

1987: America's Cup

Time to set sail and as we are in the southern oceans we will be navigating by the southern cross, and be,

2004: Celebration: Southern Cross (Designer: Brian Sadgrove)

as the line in the Australian national anthem says, - "Beneath our radiant Southern Cross" .  The next stop is the Cook Islands, fifteen small islands over a area about the size of western europe in the South Pacific. 

where we might see a bird unique to the islands and critically endangered, a little flycatcher, the Rarotonga Monarch.  It is unusual in that it has sequential plumage which as it grows, changes from orange, to orange-grey and then pure grey when it is four years old.

1989: Endangered Birds (Designer: G. Drummond)

    An entry to Sunday Stamps II theme - Southern Hemisphere- head south at See It On A Postcard

Hot and Cold

2007 Endangered Species. Royal Penguins

The only place Royal Penguins breed is on Macquarie Island (which lies halfway between Australia and Antarctica) and nobody knows where they all go for the rest of the year but here is an all action group paddling up an island stream. I like collective nouns so technically this group of penguins being on land is called a waddle, in the water a group would be a raft and young chicks together are a crèche.

Journey through stamps to a radically different environment, the Australian rainforest 

This is the vast wet tropical rainforests of North Queensland on the north-east of Australia. The Post have chosen an important habitat for flora and fauna, Daintree National Park, where some of the species here are found nowhere else on the earth.

The fauna chosen are top - Orange-thighed tree frog which dwells in the rain forest canopy and the fast flying Green-spotted triangle butterfly
Bottom - the rare nocturnal Striped possum and the small nectar-feeding Yellow-bellied sunbird

An entry to Sunday Stamps II theme - "Animals in the Wild" - to see more roam over here