50 Dollars - Elizabeth II Tropic bird, red-billed

The Bermuda Monetary Authority was established in 1969 partly to sever Bermuda's direct currency dependence on sterling, and by 2009 the BDA dollar had long been pegged one-to-one with the US dollar — a fixed rate maintained without a central bank in the conventional sense, backed instead by strict foreign currency reserve requirements. The $50 sits at the high end of everyday circulation for an island economy where tourism and reinsurance dominate, meaning fewer notes are handled hard and worn examples are genuinely less common than lower denominations.

De La Rue's production for this series is competent but unremarkable by their standards — no intaglio printing, security relying on thread and watermark rather than anything more sophisticated for the denomination.