From his father, Jacob Temminck, who was treasurer of the Dutch East India Company with links to numerous travellers and collectors, he inherited a large collection of bird specimens.

Temminck's Manuel d'ornithologie, ou Tableau systématique des oiseaux qui se trouvent en Europe (1815) was the standard work on European birds for many years.

[2] He wrote Nouveau Recueil de Planches coloriées d'Oiseaux (1820–1839), and contributed to the mammalian sections of Philipp Franz von Siebold's Fauna japonica (1844–1850).

[5] A tailless mutant of a junglefowl Gallus lafayettii was described in 1807 by Temminck, which in 1868 the English naturalist Charles Darwin incorrectly denied existed.

[6] Another junglefowl, described in 1813 by Temminck as Gallus giganteus was, he believed, one of six wild ancestral species of domestic fowl; Darwin, however, demonstrated that the latter has a single (monophyletic) origin.