This Friday, June 5, 2026 will be Dead Duck Day — and it will be the second most spectacular of all the Dead Duck Days. The most spectacular, of course, was the day the two ducks figured in the now-famous collision with, and hookup next to, the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. That incident led to the awarding of the 2003 Ig Nobel Biology Prize to ornithologist Kees Moeliker, the only human who witnessed (most of) what the ducks did on that fateful day, and documented it in words and photographs. Moeliker’s published report, “The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos”, and the attention that report garnered, led to the world coming to appreciate one of its greatest and most deadpan writers of nonfiction.
Join us in Rotterdam, on June 5, for the celebration! It will be not just a celebration of the dead duck incident, but also of Kees Moeliker’s official retirement from the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, where he was for many years the museum’s curator and then its director.
In the video you see here, Kees Moeliker tell the basic facts, in a TED Talk: