3848) Experience Nature - Butterflies Sint Eustatius, Netherland: A set of stamps issued on a Stamp Sheet featuring Butterflies and Plants and Animals found on Sint Eustatius: Date/Year of Stamp Sheet issue: 31.03.2025:
About Experience Nature - Butterflies Sint Eustatius:
On 31.03.2025, PostNL (Netherlands Post) has issued "Experience Nature - Butterflies of Sint Eustatius", a sheet featuring 10 stamps in 10 different designs.
The stamps have a denomination of 1 for mail up to 20 grams within the Netherlands. The price for a sheet of 10 stamps is €12.10.
This stamp sheet about the butterflies of Sint Eustatius is part of the multi-year series Experience Nature dedicated to the Caribbean Netherlands from 2024-2026.
Each year, the series features four stamp sheets, each with 10 different stamps.
The stamps depict plants and animals found in this part of the Netherlands.
The islands in this region boast an extraordinary biodiversity by Dutch standards, with thousands of plant and animal species.
In 2025, attention will be given to the birds, butterflies, underwater world, and flora of the island of Sint Eustatius.
On 2 January, PostNL already released the first stamp sheet in the series, focusing on the island's birds.
The second stamp sheet, Experience Nature - butterflies of Sint Eustatius highlights the following butterflies this year:
Caribbean Blue, Painted Lady, Manuel’s Skipper, Long-tailed Skipper, Cloudless Sulphur, Lime Swallowtail, Tropical Buckeye, Banded Yellow, Mallow Scrub-Hairstreak, and Florida Leafwing.
SINT EUSTATIUS:
The island of Sint Eustatius, like Bonaire and Saba, has a special status within the Netherlands. The collective name for the three islands is the Caribbean Netherlands. Together with the countries Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten, they form the Caribbean part of the Kingdom. Sint Eustatius, known locally as Statia, is part of the Leeward Islands.
This designation refers to the position of the islands relative to the prevailing northeast trade winds. Sint Eustatius lies between Saba and Saint Kitts, separated from these islands by a shallow sea. The only city and capital of Sint Eustatius is Oranjestad.
Since 2010, Sint Eustatius has been a special municipality, with the island council as the highest governing body responsible for local legislation.
The executive power lies with the island commissioners appointed by the island council, chaired by the governor.
About 3,000 people live on Sint Eustatius, and the island's official language is English.
Sint Eustatius is dominated by the dormant volcano The Quill (601 meters) in the southeast and a 200,000-year-old extinct volcanic area in the north around the hill Bergje (223 meters). There are three national parks on the island: Quill/Boven National Park, Statia National Marine Park, and Miriam Schmidt Botanical Garden.
BUTTERFLIES OF SINT EUSTATIUS:
Butterflies belong to an order of winged
insects, with approximately 160,000 described species in total.
The collective name is Lepidoptera.
This word comes from Greek, where 'lepis' means scale and 'ptera' means "wings".
The literal translation is therefore 'scale-winged.'
Indeed, the wings of butterflies are covered with scales that absorb light in various ways, creating visible colours and patterns.
Of all the butterfly species in the world, about 265 are found in the Caribbean Netherlands, with nearly 30 day-flying butterflies on Sint Eustatius (both permanent residents and occasional visitors).
The large number of yellow butterflies on the island is particularly striking, including the Small Sulphur and the Cloudless Sulphur.
The latter has its own stamp in the Experience Nature - butterflies of Sint Eustatius issue. From the family of brush-footed butterflies, the Zebra Longwing stands out, gliding through the area around the volcano The Quill.
Another brush-footed butterfly is the Painted Lady, with its orange-brown colour pattern with black and white spots on the forewings and, of course, its preference for thistles.
Another remarkable species from the tropical forest area is the Red Rim, while the Tropical Buckeye, with its striking peacock-like eyes, is a more common species on the island.
The Florida Leafwing is a striking butterfly in flight but blends completely into its surroundings when at rest, making it difficult to spot among the leaves.
DESIGN:
The stamp sheet Experience Nature - butterflies of Sint Eustatius is designed by graphic designer Frank Janse from Gouda. The sheet features all the butterflies portrayed in their natural environment, each on its own stamp.
The butterflies include: Caribbean Blue,
Painted Lady, Manuel’s Skipper, Long-tailed Skipper, Cloudless Sulphur, Lime
Swallowtail, Tropical Buckeye, Banded Yellow, Mallow Scrub-Hairstreak, and
Florida Leafwing.
All butterfly photos are incorporated into a graphic layer with circular shapes that are also visible on the sheet border. The image sometimes extends onto the adjacent stamp and the sheet border. In various places on the stamp sheet, the designer has added graphic elements derived from symbols on old topographic maps. These symbols indicate landscape forms, contour lines, vegetation, soil structures, and waterways.
The design is also characterised by an extra transparent layer with monochrome images (both white and coloured) of characteristic flora and fauna from this area.
The monochrome images are almost abstract, run across the perforations, and connect the stamps with each other and with the sheet border.
The following plants and animals are depicted: the
herb heliotrope (top center), the butterfly Long-tailed Skipper (top left), the
plant flamboyant (top right), the caterpillar of a Cloudless Sulphur (middle
right), a Lime Swallowtail (also middle right), and other vegetation typical of
the island (middle left, middle, and bottom left).
Typography:
For the typography, the DIN 2014 font was used, designed by Vasily Biryukov from Bulgaria and released by Paratype in 2015. In the captions on the stamp sheet, designer Frank Janse creatively and humorously expresses his associations with the names, characteristics, and appearances of the depicted butterflies.
In 2024, 2025, and 2026, the stamp series Experience Nature focusses on the plants and animals of the Caribbean Netherlands.
In 2024, the Leeward island of Bonaire kicked off the series, and this year, attention is on the nature of the Windward island of Sint Eustatius, located over 800 kilometers northeast of Bonaire.
Both are tropical islands, but in many ways, they differ from each other, Geologically, Sint Eustatius is essentially an extinct volcano with a large crater. There is a lot of forest, the climate is more humid than on the Leeward islands, which can be seen in the flora and fauna.
Image Selection:
For the Experience Nature series about the Caribbean Netherlands, a selection of all animals and plants for the featured islands was made in 2023.
Colourful:
The colourful nature of the depicted butterflies aligns with the character of the entire Experience Nature series about the Caribbean Netherlands.
Green Background:
On all the stamps, the background colour is predominantly green, caused by the leaves of the plants and trees on which the butterflies are photographed., drawing all attention to the appearance of the butterfly itself.
Filling the Frame:
Butterflies are ideal subjects for stamps not only because of their colours but also because of their shape.
Transparent Images:
An important aspect of the design concept for the Caribbean Netherlands stamp series is the use of transparent flora and fauna images.
Map Symbols:
In addition to the continuous colours, circles, and transparent images, Janse uses graphic elements in his design, derived from symbols used by cartographers to clarify what an area looks like.
Technical details:
Issue Date: 31.03.2025
Designer: Frank
Janse, Gouda
Printer: Koninklijke Joh.
Enschedé B.V., Haarlem
Process: Offset
Colours: Cyan, magenta,
yellow, and black (CMYK)
Size:
Stamp Size: 40.00
mm x 30.00 mm,
Sheet Size:
122.00 mm x 170 mm
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