Johann Büttikofer (9 August 1850 – 24 June 1927) was a Swiss zoologist who worked at the Blijdorp Zoological Garden in Rotterdam. After his retirement he settled in Bern, Switzerland. For his extensive contributions to the knowledge of Liberian fauna based on two zoological expeditions to the Republic of Liberia (1879 to 1882 and 1886 to 1887) he is regarded as the 'Father of Liberian Natural History'.
Early life
Büttikofer was born in Ranflüh (part of Rüderswil, Canton of Bern) in the Emmental where his father Jakob was a school teacher. He attended village school until the age of 16 and then studied French for one year, after which he attended a teacher training college in Hofwil until the age of 20. He taught school in Graswil, Switzerland for six years, hunted, began to learn taxidermy, read travel accounts, and longed to visit the tropics. He left teaching to become a preparator at the Natural History Museum of Bern where he attended lectures by Prof. Theophil Studer, who had just returned from travelling around the world.
Scientific career
In 1878, professor Ludwig Rütimeyer of Basel recommended him to become an assistant to Hermann Schlegel, the director of the Royal Museum of Natural History (Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie, now Naturalis Biodiversity Center) in Leiden, the Netherlands. He became an understudy of Schlegel, who sought to expand the museum's role in understanding animal life in Western Africa. Büttikofer joined Schlegel on a study trip to the major museums of Germany and Austria.
Recognizing Büttikofer's capabilities and potential, Schlegel proposed sending him on a six-year expedition to Africa to collect zoological specimens from several largely unexplored forest regions, specifically Liberia, the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, Cameroon and Gabon. Liberia was selected as the first destination, principally because the expedition had been offered free transportation on the ships of the Rotterdam trading firm Hendrik Muller & Co. which had several trading factories along the Liberian coast. Two zoological expeditions to Liberia were carried out between November 1879 - April 1882 and November 1886 - June 1887; the great success of the Liberia expeditions, the death of Dr. Schlegel, and Buttikofer's own health considerations caused the other initially planned destinations to be dropped.
In 1890 he published a two-volume work, "Reisebilder aus Liberia" in German. This constituted the first monograph on the Republic of Liberia, and contains some of the earliest photographs of nature in Liberia. 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.
First expedition
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. Among their finds was the first ever complete specimen of the zebra duiker (Cephalophus zebra). 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. Here, Sala's condition worsened, and he died on 10 June 1881 and was buried in a mission cemetery. 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.
During a lengthy period of convalescence, Büttikofer wrote an extensive account of his findings, in Dutch, which was published in 1883 in the journal of the Netherlands Royal Geographical Society, whose translated title is: "A Report on Liberia: Results of a Journey of Exploration Undertaken by J. Büttikofer and C. F. Sala in the Years 1879-1882." When Prof. Schlegel died in 1884, Büttikofer was appointed Curator of Birds.