As a child I had the wish to befriend a Siberian tiger. I can completely relate to that inner desire that many people have to be among wild animals. It's an amazing thing to see it when it works: some people manage to swim with tigers and hug wild bears.

When those two worlds meet or collide (sometimes resulting in the dismembering of an arm or of bodies being crushed,) I sense the overwhelming beauty of the situation. I often find that beauty on YouTube. There are hundreds of clips of people living with wolves, juggling with tigers. One of the videos takes place in a zoo.

A polar bear gets hold of the chubby leg of a typical tourist. The women had climbed over the fence and wanted to look at Blinky (his name) up close. It turned out to be a risky situation.

For the tourist, this was not a very logical thing to do. For the polar bear, it was.

My imagination is not only triggered by the fact that

From the safety of my bedroom, my imagination is not only triggered by the fact that I’m watching a polar bear named Blinky adorably sink his teeth deeper into a tourist steak on Youtube. But it’s also that I get to see Blinky as a real animal.He comes to life. Blinky momentarily experiences that his true nature lies within the borderline between the pathways on which visitors stand gawking at him and his cage.

Call it instinct, call it boredom. But what Blinky does, is not easy to explain. It just is. The name Blinky disappears with each bite he takes. Because in between the bars of his cage lies the real world where the bear might know his name or he might not.

John Berger writes that animal have been marginalised in our society because of our tendency to turn animals into products of our life. It relates to the given of dogs strongly resembling their owner. And in that margin, wild animals explore the borders of their imprisonment. A drunk tourist in a football shirt with waxy spikes on his head bangs on the glass wall surrounding a wild animal that lays on his back like some couch potato. 'For the bloody love of God, do something!' roars the man.

I'm thinking of the man who lives inside a whale. According to people, the bars of imprisonment in Disney movies or Biblical stories mainly exist out of the skin or mouths of the animals, trying to penetrate or open humans. Just like Jonah.
The impossibility of being with wild animals makes me want to try it myself. I think people who want to pet tigers are crazy, but I am tempted to try it myself. To kiss each other like lovers, press our heads against each other. Our brains should blend. The twisting of the tongue, the muscle in our body that can turn miniscule particles into big things.

Fortunately, a dog has a shape and doesn't float through the room like batter. Luckily we get to adore and pet our dogs and cats. And maybe even send them into space for the sake of experiment.

In January of 2012, a mouse plague at the Binnenhof in The Hague in Holland reached the national news. The mice would bother people and that's why the little rodents were going to be exterminated. This seemed like a great opportunity to collect a beautiful series of dead mice of the Second Chamber for the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam. Mice from The Hague were still missing from the collection, let alone mice that populated a location as important as the national house of parliament. A mouse from the House of Representatives would fit seamlessly in our growing collection of 'dead animals that tell a story' that is now led by the legendary domino sparrow.

I took my request to the department of Public Relations of the House of Representatives and could hear the adviser hesitate before he answered: "I'm going to check up on it. We will get back to you." The same day I received their official position regarding dead mice: 'The House of Representatives does not make rodents, dead animals and other waste available to third parties, also not when it's regarding a collection.' Their words were loud and clear, but their response was little tedious. My hope was now aimed at parliamentarians and clerks who could smuggle one of those dead mice outside the building. Diederik Samson offered his help but tweeted: 'Well, if I find one. But that change is small. The traps are emptied conscientiously over here.' What followed was a month of silence concerning the mouse of the Second Chamber.

Until Monday evening, February 13, 2012, when our nanny accepted a package form someone who pointed out he wanted to remain anonymous. It was a thick envelop coming from the House of Representatives (type TH-9), with the words 'to Kees Moeliker Here is 'the mouse of the Second Chamber', written in big block letters. The package indeed contained a mouse, still in the trap that had obviously killed it.

Meanwhile, the mouse has been prepared and included in the collection 'Dead animals that tell a story' of the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam. Section made clear it was a healthy young female of the house mouse. Her stomach contained bread crumbs, and the bait that had been used to capture her was peanut butter that had been put inside a professional mouse trap of the type Snap-E®.

The mouse of the chamber of parliament - The Hague, February 14 2012

The first mouse of the Second Chamber that was included in the museum collection.

Mus musculus, young female, including trap and envelope; anonymous donation (NMR 9990-03072).

Photo: Kees Moeliker

Museum Vrolik’s origin lies in the inner city of Amsterdam. Museum Vrolikinianum, the private collection belonging to Gerard Vrolik (1775-1869) and his son Willem (1801 –1863), was housed in Gerard’s stately home on the Amstel, not far from the Waterlooplein. During the ‘40’s and ‘50’s of the last century, scholars from all over the world flocked to the museum to marvel at its renowned collection. Father Gerard Vrolik, professor of botany, obstetrics, anatomy and surgery, collected specimens mainly in the field of pathological anatomy, a field that was rapidly emerging during his time. His son Willem, professor in anatomy, physiology, and zoology, preferred comparative anatomy and birth defects.

When Willem Vrolik died in 1863, the Museum Vrolik contained 5103 objects. Among these included specimens of rare birth defects such as ‘double miscarriages’, cyclopses and sirens, dozens of ‘sickeningly deformed bones’, two skeletons of dwarves, an enormous skull belonging to a man with hydrocephalus, and the skeleton of a lion once belonging to King Louis Napoleon.

Museum Vrolik, cycloop

Vrolik’s widow was keen to sell this enormous collection. The collection was headed towards being taken apart and shipped off abroad. A group of prominent Amsterdammers felt that this would be a great loss for the city. They bought the widow’s entire collection and granted it to the Athenaeum Illustre, the forerunner to the University of Amsterdam.

Museum Vrolik was the last great private collection of its kind in The Netherlands. From the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, the ‘ordinary’ anatomist was no longer concerned with illnesses and thus the amassing of collections in the field ceased. Furthermore, Darwin’s theory of evolution (1859) sparked a whole new perspective on the development of species. In Vrolik’s world of ideas, a divine “power of formation” was still seen as the driving force to develop a living being, but Darwin’s theory of selection dispelled this thought.

The Vrolik collection forms, as it were, a time capsule of the moment just before large-scale medical and scientific changes would usher in a new scientific era. The scientific spirit of the Vrolik’s nineteenth century remained within the collection.

In the current Museum Vrolik, an entire wall in the exhibition is dedicated to portraying the Vrolik collection’s broad inclusion of that 19th century spirit. Two display cases covering the entire wall and a historical cabinet show human skeletons and skulls diseased with rickets, scoliosis and syphilis placed next to organs of a great diversity of animal species as well as both normal and deformed skeletons.

Since September 2012, the Museum Vrolik’s permanent collection has been completely renewed. The ‘new’ Museum Vrolik is truly a museum of collections with more than a thousand preparations, skeletons, and skulls. There is no clear route within the museum: one can wander through display cases and be amazed at a congenital defect, at how we are built; they can explore, wonder, and make comparisons.

“Wilmering's favourite ornithological book is Check-list of Birds of the World by James Lee Peters (1889-1952). It consists of no fewer than 16 hefty volumes, the last of which appeared in 1987. After the author's death, fellow ornithologists completed his life's work. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is the fact that the checklist is no more than the title suggests: an endless list of bird names, systematically arranged according to class, order, genus, family and species. It is not the type of book one would expect to find in the bookcase of an artist, for the simple reason that there are no illustrations. It is a work by and for the scientist who has already done his field work. Identification is followed by ordination, classification and taxonomy. Observation by registration, tables, and diagrams. A bird is best 'read' in letters and numbers, a fact that was clear to Carolus Linnaeus back in the mid-18th century. In designing his Systema Natura, he gave both plants and animals double Latin names, again without benefit of illustrations. While the new system was a boon to scientists and collectors, the average fancier who had to rely on a Latin text would have been at pains to identify the bird that just landed on a nearby branch.

Check-list of Birds of the World by James Lee Peters

Few artists had mastered the true-to-life illustration of nature, and one wonders if people actually believed what they were seeing. Nature is of such overwhelming beauty that it is sometimes hard to believe that it is real. When in 1719 Louis Renard published his book on the fish, lobsters and crabs of Ambon, he came in for considerable criticism. No one believed in the existence of such "candy canes with fins": surely those shocking pink creatures were a figment of the artist's imagination! But by the time the second edition appeared in 1754, the publisher had rounded up several eyewitnesses who attested to the authenticity of the illustrations. One of them was Aernout Vosmaer, director of the menagerie and zoological cabinet of Stadholder William V. He assured the doubters that the astonishing shapes and colours of those tropical fish and crustaceans were indeed true to life. But the illustration of a mermaid no doubt led many readers to view the book with a critical eye. Such mythical creatures were ultimately discredited by the new classification system devised by Linnaeus. Henceforth encyclopaedic works devoted to natural history no longer included illustrations of griffins, eight-headed monsters, and fishtails sewn onto shaved monkey torsos. In the 17th century books were still being published which included the harpy, an unsavoury creature with the head of an old woman, sharp claws and a filthy torso. Until empirical research ultimately proved that no one had ever seen a harpy nest. For centuries, bats were also regarded as birds, since they had wings but no feet. Thanks to Linnaeus, they later winged their way into the world of mammals.

In the end, scientists could not do without serious artists. Between 1750 and 1850, thousands of illustrated volumes saw the light of day, in the belief that nature in its entirety could be committed to paper. This led to a host of megalomaniacal projects, which foundered due to their striving for completeness. By the time a register was completed, there were already hundreds of new sorts awaiting publication: the seas proved inexhaustible, the forests unfathomable. But then came the solution: specialization. The striving was no longer to include all the birds in the world, but only those found in India, say, in the southern foothills of the Himalayas, and preferably only the parakeets native to that area. Years ago, I purchased just such a book.

Luuk Wilmering, Bird needs shelter - Scientist Natural habitat of the stork - nr.2

One of the most beautiful bird books in the world comes very close to Wilmering's bird installation, in which the birds are served up by the hunter, the gastronomist, the scientist and the artist. It is The Birds of America (1827-1838) by John James Audubon: the authoritative five-volume bird book in which 443 North American species are described and portrayed life-size. Today it is the world's most expensive book. For days, Audubon would conceal himself in the undergrowth, observing the birds and taking meticulous notes on how they flew, how they mated, and how they fed their young. This was inevitably followed by the aiming of a gun and the pulling of a trigger. For Audubon the hunter, it was a unique experience to feel the body while it was still warm, to observe it at close quarters, and to add to his drawing the most minute details of beak, feet, toes and the inner side of the wings. He used wires to bend the birds into natural poses, while a grid served as the background, ensuring that the animal was drawn in the correct proportions. This method was later borrowed by the photographer Eadward Muybridge for his photo studies of people and animals in motion. Here we see the real Audubon at work. No doubt he lit a fire that same evening and, after grilling the plucked coot or wood stork, dined on his specimens. Many of these descriptions are accompanied by culinary tips: the yellow-billed cuckoo, for example, is at its most flavourful in the autumn, while the American scarlet rosefinch tastes like any other small bird. It is thanks to his direct contact with the dying animals that he is able to immerse himself in his models. He is the anatomist who dissects carcasses with his own teeth. Audubon was an empirical researcher who wound silver wire around a bird's leg, and a year later confirmed that some birds return to the spot where they emerged from the egg...”

I am the Old World Flycatcher

and I am a looser
not a fashionable cosmopolite
just a conservative from the countryside
when I return from the warm south
there is nothing left to eat
except some leftovers of faded flowers and tough seeds
I am the Rose-ringed Parakeet
and I am a real winner
I escaped from your warm loft to go out for dinner
outside it is as warm as in amazonas
I don‘t eat nuts, I prefer the left overs from McDonalds
people say the city is no good for nature
but I don‘t agree, it‘s a matter of behaviour
if you earn your money with emissions on stock exchange
why shouldn‘t I be the winner of climate change?
The winner takes it all,
the looser standing small...