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Stamps

                             
                  Published Saturday
                        January 6, 2001

                        Prairie Photograph Adorns New Stamp

                        BY JULIE ANDERSON

                        WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER 


 A tallgrass prairie outside Nebraska's capital city, photographed by a
Lincoln man, will soon join the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls on   postage
stamps carrying America's wonders around the world. The new, 70-cent
international stamp featuring Nine-Mile Prairie, as photographed by Michael
Forsberg, tentatively is scheduled to be released March 6 in Lincoln. 
  The stamp is part of the American Scenes series. The prairie scene, along
with its more famous landmark counterparts, was chosen as part of an effort
to focus            on America's beautiful sights, said Dave Failor,
manager of community relations for the U.S. Postal Service in  Washington,
D.C. 

 The Nine-Mile Prairie stamp will come just weeks after a 70-cent stamped
card featuring a photograph of the Badlands shot by nature photographer
David Muench of
Santa Barbara, Calif., and just weeks before a special commemorative sheet
of 10 stamps on the Great Plains prairie. 

But the string of stamps representing the Great Plains  does not appear to
be an attempt by the Postal Service to focus on the nation's midsection,
said Failor, who previously worked for the Postal Service in Omaha. 

"We try to come up with images and subjects that represent the country," he
said. 

While the Nine-Mile Prairie won't be released with a special ceremony, the
Postal Service will be involved in a stamp- and photo-signing by Forsberg
on March 8 at the Great Plains Art Collection in Hewit Place, 1155 Q St. in
Lincoln. 

The Great Plains Prairie stamps, in turn, will have a first-day issue
ceremony April 19 at Morrill Hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 
Such ceremonies typically draw collectors from across the country who buy
the stamps and obtain special, hand-stamped first issue cancellations. 
 "It becomes a very valuable collector's item," said Susan Frink, customer
relations coordinator for the Postal Service in Lincoln. 
There has been a renewed interest in prairie restoration over the last
decade, said Jim Stubbendieck, director of the Center for Great Plains
Studies at UNL. 

Nine-Mile Prairie northwest of Lincoln is an example of the tallgrass
prairie that once covered the landscape from Ohio to eastern Nebraska. Most
of it has been cut up or paved over. Nine-Mile, a 230-acre preserve used
for research and education, has been owned by the University of Nebraska
Foundation since the 1980s and is managed by a committee made up of
community representatives and university officials, including Stubbendieck. 

Forsberg's photo of the prairie was chosen by a photo research agency in
Washington. 
Forsberg said he took the photo in the fall of 1996 after lugging a
stepladder out to the area every day for a week. The ladder raised him off
the ground. 
"What I wanted to do was give people a sense of the tallgrass prairie,
particularly that it would have been like for a person on horseback or in a
covered wagon 150 years ago as they were rolling across Nebraska," Forsberg
said. 
Few such views of tallgrass prairie are available anymore without telephone
poles or buildings in the background. 
"It's almost like we're chasing ghosts out here on the landscape," he said. 
the Great Plains Prairie stamps are the third in the Nature of America
series, which previously has featured the Sonoran Desert and the Pacific
Coast rain forest, Failor said.Each of the 34-cent stamps on the Great
Plains Prairie sheet is part of a painting by John Dawsonof Hilo, Hawaii.
The stamps feature Great Plains species such as bison, prairie dogs and
prairie chickens. 
A special symposium is set April 19 to coincide with the stamps'
first-issue release, Stubbendieck said. It will be sponsored by the Center
for Great Plains Studies, the Center for Grassland Studies, the Nature
Conservancy and the Audubon Society.

                       

 Submitted Glenn Pollock Omaha NE                       


                                     
                          
                       

                         





                                  














                                
                                            
         
                                            


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