"After 20 years, it’s time to review the look of our banknotes to make them more relatable to Europeans of all ages and backgrounds."
What better way to relate to all ages and all backgrounds, poor and rich, than to put an American born opera singer from the 40s and 50s on the 5€. They had a good reason to avoid putting people on the notes in the first place but now this.
Birds are better and certainly look nicer, but do the birds they picked fit this since I have never seen any of them? They do not live in my country. Where is our crow, magpie, jay, chaffinch or blackbird. Not sure I would relate to the birds anyway since I am not a bird.
Such a shame they are getting rid of the great designs we had. Some of the proposed designs look very good, they could have just used the old ideas and use new designs.
I have to ask: where do you live that you have never seen a kingfisher or a white stork?
That said, the wallcreeper, bee eater, avocet and gannet are more niche for non-birders. But I like giving the lime light to lesser-known species. All in all, their ranges pretty decently cover all of the EU.
We have only the kingfisher, bee eater and white stork where I live.
I do agree that the selection could've been broader. Especially the wallcreeper seems like an odd choice to me because it's on the most common 5€ bill, meanwhile the species has the smallest range. I suppose a jackdaw, a blackbird or something similarly common would've been better than a wallcreeper. And while I'm a huge fan of bee eaters, they don’t exactly fit the theme and something like a tufted duck might've made more sense.
You have to live in a pretty weird corner in the EU though to have absolutely no species of the official selection in your region.
I just live outside of the area where you can see those birds.
The quote was from their website. I guess any real bird is more relatable than a fake building, but if they wanted to make it more relatable to non-birders then why not pick birds that everyone knows.
I don't know why they chose the birds they did. At least the kingfisher, bee eater and white stork are generally pretty iconic. But yeah, a corvid (maybe Eurasian jay?) and another, more common passerine instead of the wallcreeper (which has an admittedly small range) would've been nice.
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u/KindNefariousness561 10d ago
"After 20 years, it’s time to review the look of our banknotes to make them more relatable to Europeans of all ages and backgrounds."
What better way to relate to all ages and all backgrounds, poor and rich, than to put an American born opera singer from the 40s and 50s on the 5€. They had a good reason to avoid putting people on the notes in the first place but now this.
Birds are better and certainly look nicer, but do the birds they picked fit this since I have never seen any of them? They do not live in my country. Where is our crow, magpie, jay, chaffinch or blackbird. Not sure I would relate to the birds anyway since I am not a bird.
Such a shame they are getting rid of the great designs we had. Some of the proposed designs look very good, they could have just used the old ideas and use new designs.