A little less than a year ago I joked about the 105-year-old bird in my house when I got my 1913 French Rooster.

Right around Christmas I found another coin featuring another flightless bird that I wanted - a 2009 New Zealand One Ounce Silber Kiwi in MS69.

Normally, I wouldn’t have been game to buy another big coin this quickly after getting the 1877 10G. I try to space these things out and savor them a little more, but these coins just don’t come up very often.

For context, the 2009 is a relatively common kiwi with a total mintage just 12,500 (rarer coins in the series only have mintages of 2,500-4,000). These coins also usually don’t get graded by the third-party services. They’re usually left in the original mint blister cards. For most of the series issues there’s only 6 or fewer graded by NGC. 2008 is a notable exception with 24 graded by NGC. To build my set 10 years ago I had to buy raw 2004, 2005, and 2006 kiwis and send them in for grading myself. The set by DZ-collection was similar in that his set was composed of mostly coins that he sent in together for grading around 2011 and they all share an invoice number as a result.

When one of the six NGC-graded 2009 kiwis pops-up for sale on eBay it does get my attention.

I put in an offer for the coin and it was accepted. The name of the seller on eBay, “dz3d,” and the fact that there’s only 6 coins like this in the world had me wondering if this coin might be the one from the #1 ranked DZ-Collection set.

It turns out I was right. When I went to register the coin, it didn’t go through initially because the transfer request had to be processed. Turns out he’s liquidating his set and has sold most of the rest of it in the last month or so. Looks like I missed a chance to take in his 2007.

Adding the 2009 would have put my set over the top of his regardless but the coin leaving his set to enter mine put my set pretty solidly in first place in the category. I’m hoping I’ll get to work on acquiring the 2007, the 2010 and some of the later years, which mostly receive “specimen” (“SP”) grades.

I know it happens a lot and we’ve even had journals recently about major registry sets going up for auction in waves, but it always feels a little bittersweet to grow a set because another great set in the category is being broken up.

This set is one of the few that I own that is nearly completely homogeneous in terms of the generation of holder that it uses. Almost my whole set has been graded since NGC started using the Edge-view holders for everything in 2008/2009. It makes for a really charming presentation IMO.

I know many that own those refer the original mint packaging, but I don’t like blister cards and cardboard for long term storage. As it is, my 2004 has a nice all-over golden hue to it and my 2005 has some very subtle rose colors over parts of the surface that I think are the result of spending about 5-6 years in those blister cards. So, while I buck the trend in that regard with this set, I’m very unapologetic in doing so.