Cuban birds

I received recently a letter from Cuba, a very simple one, and I decided to share it with you. As you will see it has nothing very exceptional but I selected it because of two reasons:

- I rarely receive letters from Cuba. I think this is the third one only in the four years of existence of this blog
- it is now less and less common to receive a letter with a clean and neat cancellation

So here is the cover.

As I said the cancellation is rather clean, a simple round postmark which cancels cleanly the stamp.
A third reason why I selected this cover is that it is franked with a stamp picturing a bird and even if this is not my topic of collection I do like birds on stamps. I think this is a rather nice and colorful topic.

The stamp is part of a set of eight stamps issued on the 22^nd of May 2008. Here is the full set.

From left to right and top to bottom, the birds that are pictured are:

Cuban Tody (Todus multicolor)
Cuban Solitaire (Myadestes elisabeth)
Cuban Green Woodpecker (Xiphidiopicus percussus)
Cuban Trogon (Priotelus temnurus)
Cuban Parakeet (Aratinga euops)
Zapata Sparrow (Torreornis inexpectata)
Bee Hummingbird (Mellisuga helenae) , which is the smallest living bird on earth!
Cuban Vireo (Vireo gundlachii)

The particularity is that all those birds are endemic to Cuba. There are so many contries that issue stamps picturing subjects that have no real link with their culture or environment that it could be underlined.