Kai KupferschmidtTAÏ NATIONAL PARK IN IVORY COAST—The message arrived as Fabian Leendertz was watching what he calls “breakfast TV”: a troop of black-and-white colobus monkeys leaping acrobatically through the trees that tower above the remote field camp here near the Liberian border.
A colleague had received word that the carcass of a duiker, a kind of antelope, had been spotted in the rainforest some 10 kilometers away.The notification launched Leendertz, a wildlife veterinarian at the Robert Koch Institute, into a race against time.
The jungle is a hungry place, and Leendertz and his team needed to hike to the carcass before it was hauled away by a leopard or consumed by smaller animals.