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2025-07-15 Europe

What Dead Birds Have to Do with the End of Europe

[Free Press] Two years ago Michela Padovani, a 32-year-old microbiologist from Verona, traveled to Venice for Italy’s once-a-year taxidermy licensing exam. Venice is the only city that allows the Italian Taxidermy Association (ATI) to administer its test. Twenty years ago, Padovani might have been part of a cohort of 10 or 15 aspiring taxidermists. But she is the only taxidermist to have earned a license that year—or since.

Padovani, a sunny and soft-spoken blonde, likes birds, puzzles, and collecting. Taxidermy drew the three interests together. "It seemed so precise and creative, so satisfying, as a craft," she told me this spring. The weekend-long Italian National Taxidermy Championship was winding down and Padovani, who had just won Best in Show in Birds—for a first-place cuckoo, a parakeet, and a long-tailed glossy starling, embalmed dragonfly in its beak—kvelled over her awards.

Outside her orbit, however, the mood was more glum. "We have an enormous problem," said Iginio Bressan, president emeritus of the ATI.

"Twenty years ago we had 400 entries," said Piero Della Libera, a 66-year-old graphic designer who won third prize in small birds for a blue-gray thrush. "Now we have 81."

Posted by Besoeker 2025-07-15 10:01|| E-Mail|| Front Page|| ||Comments [50 views ] Top

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