Flock of birds tattoo6/10/2023 ![]() The moment I was allowed to travel I set out for western Europe. I needed to reconnect to my roots: The Lammergeier seemed to hold a key to the Old World for me. As I got older I watched all my friends travel. I always wanted to see this bird, but my family came to the United States undocumented from Spain. It acquires its orange plumage by wallowing in sulfur springs, and has a wild red eye ring and a long beard. It's one of the rarest and most specialized raptors in the world (only found in southern Europe and the Alps): It eats the bone marrow of wild ungulates in high alpine regions by dropping their large bones against rocks. Black-and-white WarblerĮver since I was a kid I remember flipping through old nature books and coming across the imposing quebrantahuesos, better known as the Bearded Vulture or Lammergeier. Or maybe you’ll realize it’s time to jump the gun and put a bird on it-permanently. Maybe you’ll feel compelled to share your own. Here are the tales behind the tats of this year's contestants and winners. They determined the first-place champ, who got to go home with a pair of Eagle Optics binoculars. Bruce Richardson, actress Lili Taylor, Kelly McKinne, a volunteer from the local Black Swamp Bird Observatory, and last year’s champion Meishia Kernahan. ![]() The panel of judges is always a mixed bag: The most recent contest included comedian R. As the sun dips down into Lake Erie, contestants of all ages take a break from workshops and hikes to peel back their sweat-soaked shirts, roll up their mud-streaked pants, and share their stories of how they chose their ink as a hundred or so bystanders watch. “This ain’t your grandma’s birding festival,” says Kenn Kaufman, whose wife Kimberly runs the Biggest Week (like a boss, by the way). Among the 2,000 birders attending, you’ll find several with tributes to passerines, owls, hummingbirds, and even vultures, bursting across their skin. The contest first kicked off three years ago when the festival’s organizers felt like they had to spice things up and make birding more relatable. ![]() The Biggest Week is a 10-day festival that takes place in Oak Harbor, Ohio, pegged around the 37 warbler species that visit the region during mid-May. For those who find inspiration in the latter, the ultimate chance to show off comes during the Biggest Week in American Birding’s annual tattoo contest. Sometimes the muse is flesh and blood other times it's feathers and wings. Triumph, grief, recklessness, nostalgia: People have all kinds of reasons for getting inked.
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