The 25th Dead Duck Day, on June 5th, which was postponed from 2020 until 2021, will be more or less postponed till 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So be on the lookout for the special (postponed) 25th anniversary edition in 2022.
This year, like last year, Dead Duck Day will have only two participants – me and the stuffed duck, accompanied by a bottle of beer, just as on the very first Dead Duck Day celebration, 26 years ago.
Kees Moeliker
Of course everybody is free and invited to have private Dead Duck Day celebrations, anywhere in the world, to commemorate the dramatic death of the duck — and the tragedy of billions of other birds that die from colliding with glass buildings.
Here is a photo from a previous #DeadDuckDay, with a massive public gathering at Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, the site of the historic collision (photo by Maarten Laupman):
Nonetheless, a Joyous Day, This June 5, 2021
The good—not just good, but excellent—news is that June 5, 2021 is the day when the museum will be re-opening to the public, after a long closure because of the pandemic.
The number of visitors will be strictly limited because of Covid precautions. To go inside the museum on re-opening day, you can (and if you want to get in, you must!) book tickets in advance, online. And when you are there, pay your own personal homage to the carcass of the victim duck, which now resides permanently inside the museum with which it had that fatal, fateful, historic crash 26 years ago.
Ig Nobel Duck
The mallard duck that is a vital part of Dead Duck Day became known to science as the first (documented) ‘victim’ of homosexual necrophilia in that species, and earned its discoverer, Kees Moeliker, the 2003 Ig Nobel Biology Prize.