2014-S Everglades, NIFC

The 2014-S Everglades, NIFC closed the third year of San Francisco business-strike ATB production, the fifth and final 2014 design sold direct to collectors. Joseph Menna's reverse depicts an anhinga drying its wings on a tree branch with a roseate spoonbill in flight in the background, two of the wading birds that define the south Florida wetlands the design honors. The Mint produced 1,168,308 pieces, matching the uniform 2014 NIFC figure and rounding out a third-year run that totaled roughly 5.84 million S-mint business strikes across all five designs.

The coin is a business strike with cartwheel luster, not a proof, and the call between the two finishes is the only authentication question of consequence. Both the 2014-S NIFC and the 2014-S clad and silver proofs of this design carry an S mintmark above Washington's head, so mintmark placement does not separate them, but field reflection does. Cartwheel rotation across the open fields reads business strike; mirrored fields with frosted devices reads proof. Menna's bird-on-branch composition depends on fine detail in the anhinga's wing feathers and the spoonbill silhouette, and on a NIFC business strike those elements show standard Mint State definition rather than the high-contrast frosted relief a proof produces. The clad composition (75% copper-nickel over a pure copper core, 5.67 grams) follows the standard Washington quarter formula since 1965.

This is a Regular-classification issue with a small but real wildlife-collector following beyond NIFC completists. The anhinga-and-spoonbill composition is one of the more distinctive natural-history scenes in the ATB program, and the issue trades a hair above the typical NIFC baseline because of that broader appeal. Population reports at MS67 are well-supplied, MS68 examples come up regularly, and set builders working through the 45-entry NIFC run pick the date up from broken Uncirculated Coin Sets or dealer inventory at retail-floor pricing. For the broader story of the ATB program and the NIFC collector-only product line, see the Washington ATB series history.