Johann Büttikofer

An annotated English translation of this publication was produced in November, 2012 by Brill (Leiden), titled "Travel Sketches from Liberia: Johann Büttikofer's 19th Century Rainforest Explorations in West Africa", co-edited by Henk Dop and Phillip T. Robinson.

On the first expedition, Büttikofer was accompanied by a Dutchman, Carolus Franciscus Sala of Leiden, who had previously served in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army and had also collected zoological specimens in present-day Angola.

Venturing into areas in the lands of the Gola people along the Saint Paul River that had never before been visited by Europeans, Büttikofer and Sala were highly successful in their collecting activities.

Suffering from a range of adversities, rapacious local chieftains, malaria and other tropical medical afflictions, Büttikofer and Sala next set up a collecting station at Robertsport.

Büttikofer continued collecting, now in the company of the Liberian hunter Jackson Demery, and also visited the various coastal trading posts in eastern Liberia, until severe ill health forced him to return to Europe.

Whereas Büttikofer's first expedition was funded by Schlegel, his second was largely financed by himself, on an unpaid leave of absence, with costs to be recuperated by selling specimens to the Leiden museum and others.

As a co-worker, he recruited a Swiss boyhood acquaintance and fellow avid hunter, Franz Xaver Stampfli (1847-1903) of Solothurn, Switzerland, who had come to visit him while intending to emigrate to the United States.

During his stay in the general area of the Junk River, Stampfli discovered an antelope species entirely new to science, the Jentink's duiker (Cephalophus jentinki), but had to return for convalescence in the spring of 1886.

The "Reisebilder aus Liberia", as well as the ongoing series of publications based upon his collected specimens, soon established Büttikofer as the unrivalled authority on Liberian fauna.

A small 6 ha ornithological reserve established in his honour in 1926 on the island of Texel in the North Holland province of the Netherlands still bears the name Büttikofer's Mieland.

This reserve is now part of a complex of larger and smaller terrains referred to as "The low lands of Texel" and managed by the Netherlands Society for the Preservation of Natural Monuments Vereniging Natuurmonumenten.

In 1924 Büttikofer retired and relocated to Bern, Switzerland, residing only a short distance from the natural history museum where he began his highly productive career.