This card supplies us with the most easy to spot garden visitor, a bird - which we can see flying above, or hear in the trees, whether or not they visit our garden.
As well as them also being fond of a tasty insect, slug or snail, some species eat larger predators too.
Others, like starlings, aerate your lawn with their beaks whilst hunting beetles, whilst some take seed off your plants and distribute it elsewhere in your garden, or maybe in someone`s who will be inspired to start gardening when that one seed comes up.
This bright bird is the missel thrush, the first of all the birds to nest, usually in March, but, these days of changing temperatures, often in February. As the card tells us, the name "missel" refers to the bird`s love of mistletoe berries.
This card has several variations, described in our original reference book to the issues of John Player & Sons (RB.17, first published in 1950), as :
23. 50. BIRDS & THEIR YOUNG. Small cards. Fronts in colour. Backs in grey, with descriptive text. Issued June-August 1937, with special album
- A. Home issue, with I.T.C. and Album clauses, adhesive
- B. Channel Islands issue, without I.T.C. and Album clauses, adhesive
- C. Irish issues, with I.T.C. clause and large green numerals on backs.
1. Adhesive, with Album clause
2. Non-adhesive, with Exchange Scheme clause
By the time of our World Tobacco Issues Index, six years later, the group is catalogued very differently. First up, under Player section 2.B, for "Issues 1922-39, excluding cards with adhesive back", appears the Irish issue without the adhesive back, listed as
- BIRDS & THEIR YOUNG. Sm. Nd. (50). Back with large green numerals overprinted. Irish issue. See RB.17/23.C.2 ... P72-67
Two of the three others have to wait until Section 2.C, for "Issues 1934-39. Cards with adhesive back", these being :
- BIRDS & THEIR YOUNG. Sm. Nd. (50). See RB.17/23 ... P72-15
A. Home issue, album wording "one penny"
B. Irish issue. Back with large green numerals overprinted.
Lastly. the missing one turns up under section 3.C, for "Issues 1935-39. Chiefly in Channel Islands and Malta"
- BIRDS & THEIR YOUNG. Sm. Nd. (50). See RB.17/23.B ... P72-213
The same format persists in our updated version, but the codes have changed, the Irish non-adhesive backed issue becoming P644-142, and the Home issue and the Irish adhesive issues changing to P644-312 A and B. However the Channel Islands (and Malta) issue is far removed, and now appears under section 4.C, owing to the fact that more modern sets have been circulated and needed to slide in before the overseas. That means the new code for that one is P644-658.