3 Dollars - Elizabeth II Australian Owl

Tuvalu's authority to issue coinage derives from a currency agreement with Australia, and the island nation has leveraged that arrangement since the 1970s to produce collector issues well beyond the needs of its roughly 10,000 inhabitants. The Australian Owl series was part of a broader wave of Perth Mint-produced wildlife gold fractionals marketed primarily to Northern Hemisphere collectors during the mid-2000s commodity boom, when gold's rise from under $400 to over $600 per troy ounce made small-denomination gold coins commercially attractive to mint and to own.

The Perth Mint struck this piece, as it did virtually all Tuvaluan collector coinage of the period.