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Last year, at dawn on
March 26, an exhausted Mohamed Henriques slid into his airplane seat. He had just managed to make it onto the last flight that left Guinea-Bissau before the small West African country closed its borders due to the coronavirus pandemic. Down below, amid the rest of the passengers’ luggage, sat the sole reason for his trip: a Styrofoam box filled with the corpses of three Hooded Vultures.
The days leading up to the flight had been a relentless race against the clock. As an internationally protected species, Hooded Vultures require transportation permits that usually take months to acquire. Henriques had a couple of weeks. And though the birds had arrived from the crime scene eight days before his flight, a pandemic curfew and ongoing political turmoil within the country further complicated the process. Eventually, with only seven hours left, Henriques managed to ob