Kees Moeliker

Kees Moeliker
Moeliker with ducks in the Natural History Museum Rotterdam in 2004
Born	Cornelis W. Moeliker 1960
Residence	Rotterdam, Netherlands
Fields	Zoology, ornithology
Institutions	Director of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam.
Known for	Research and TED Talk about observing homosexual necrophilia in a mallard duck
Notable awards	Ig Nobel Prize for Biology (2003)
Website moeliker.wordpress.com

Cornelis W. "Kees" Moeliker (born 9 October 1960) is a Dutch biologist and director of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam. He is also European Bureau Chief of the Annals of Improbable Research.

Moeliker's father worked for forty years as a technical illustrator for the (subsequently superseded) . Kees himself was provided with education at the Pieter Caland School in Rotterdam. During this time he used to wander across the nature reserves in the Rotterdam area. On one of his walks, in 1973, he made the first ever recorded observation in the area of an Egyptian Nile goose (Alopochen aegyptiacus).

He went on to study biology and geography at a teacher training institution in Delft. He graduated with a research project on the winter-season feeding ecology of the Long eared owl (Asio otus). The research later provided the basis for a section in his 1989 compilation, "Owls" ("Uilen"). Moeliker also collaborated on the research led by the high-profile Biology/Ornithology Professor , undertaken at the Free University (Amsterdam) into the population ecology of the House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) in Rotterdam.

Before he joined the Natural History Museum Rotterdam, Moeliker worked as an assistant-butcher, an English teacher in Istanbul, a nature guide in Costa Rica and a biology teacher at several high schools. He joined the museum, initially as an educational assistant, in 1989. From 1999 to 2015 he has been the museum's Curator and Head of Communications. Since 1 December 2015 he is the museum's Director.

In 1991, together with Kees Heij, he discovered a Black-chinned monarch (Monarcha boanensis), a bird that had been thought extinct, on the island of Boano, in the Indonesian province of Maluku. A subsequent Moeliker rediscovery, in 2001, involved the Waigeo brush-turkey (Aepypodius bruijnii) he identified in Waigeo Island, West Papua. With Erwin J.O. Kompanje, Moeliker identified and described a subspecies of Long-tongued nectar bat (Macroglossus minimus booensis), of which the known habitat is restricted to the little Island of Boo in the east of Indonesia.