British scientist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who has died aged 83, became the world's leading expert on the behavior of African elephants and played a vital role in their conservation.
His efforts to save the African elephant began in 1965 when, as an Oxford zoology graduate who had also just received his pilot's license, he flew his Piper Pacer plane from Nairobi to the pocket Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania. The challenge he took on at the age of 23 was how to solve the problem of 450 elephants trapped in a space too small to contain them.
For five years, after building a camp in an area famous for its tree-climbing lions, he lived among Manyara's elephants, first learning to recognize them as individuals in order to conduct the first systematic study of their behavior in the wild.
He was completely fearless, a quality that served him well as his work involved risk. Often he had to climb trees to avoid being killed by angry elephants, such as the fearsome matriarch he called Boadicea, and three times his Land Rover was impaled by their tusks. But in the end they accepted it, while remaining truly wild.
During his stay in Manyara, Oria Rocco came to visit him from the family farm on the shores of Lake Naivasha in Kenya. Oriya not only fell in love with Manyara and her elephants – she stayed and married the dashing young scientist in 1971, and they had two daughters, Saba and Dudu. The story of their early years together, the best-selling book Among Elephants (1975) was illustrated with stunning photographs of Oriya, including one of her presenting Saba as an infant in the arms of a wild elephant and her calf.
As the first scientist to study the social interactions of elephants, Ian concluded that understanding their seasonal migratory movements was key to their conservation. But the growing threat of ivory poaching soon forced him to dedicate the rest of his life to stopping the flow of tusks that was bleeding out of Africa.
Although elephant poaching was endemic in Africa, the price of ivory remained stable until 1969, but then suddenly soared as tusks became a commodity to be stored and sold, like gold. It proved disastrous for Africa's vast elephant herds, and Kenya became the first country to feel the full impact of rising ivory prices when shifta – Somali poachers armed with semi-automatic weapons – raided Tsavo National Park, the country's largest elephant stronghold.
I first met Ian in the late 1970s, and it was at his urging that I traveled to Tsavo in 1988 to report for the Sunday Times on what became known as the “ivory wars.” By then, the scourge of poaching had already spread far beyond Kenya, reaching every corner of the elephants' range and reducing their numbers from 1.3 million to 600,000 within a decade. “Make no mistake,” he said. “What we are witnessing is the greatest animal tragedy of this century.”
To prove his point, he began conducting pan-African aerial surveys that revealed the extent of the crisis for the first time. In 1980 he was appointed honorary chief warden in Uganda, where he introduced air and ground patrols against Sudanese poachers who sometimes shot at his plane, and in 1988 Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands awarded him the Order of the Golden Ark for alerting the world to the extent of elephant slaughter. He was appointed CBE in 2015.
It turned out that 90% of all ivory reserves were obtained illegally, and in July 1989, the President of Kenya Daniel arap me publicly set on fire 12-ton tusk fire worth $6 million. The case made by Ian and his fellow conservationists was so compelling that Cites (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) was forced to ban international trade in ivory in 1990. The full story is told in the book Battle for the Elephants (1992), written by Ian and Oriya.
While the ban did not completely end poaching, it did give Africa's dwindling elephant herds a precious reprieve, time when their numbers could increase again, and to that end, in 1993 Ian moved to Samburu National Park in northern Kenya and founded Save the elephantsa conservation charity working to secure the future of this species by allowing them to coexist alongside local communities. There he pioneered satellite tracking techniques for collared elephants, an invaluable tool for improving their protection and preventing potential conflicts with humans.
Ian was born in Donhead St Andrew, Wiltshire, the son of Lord David Douglas-Hamilton, who commanded a Spitfire squadron during the Second World War and died in a plane crash in 1944. Prunella Stackhead of the Women's Health and Beauty League, a fitness organization founded by her mother in the 1930s. He was educated at Gordonstoun School in Scotland and Oriel College, Oxford, where he received a BA in Biology and a PhD in Zoology before realizing his childhood dream of moving to Kenya.
In 2008, Ian had a near miss in Samburu when he was attacked by an elephant, which then tried to impale him as he lay on the ground. Somehow he emerged unharmed, with little damage except for a broken pair of glasses. Ultimately, his life was ended not by elephants, but by a swarm of bees that attacked him as he returned home to Naivasha. He was flown to Cape Town for treatment but never recovered.
He is survived by Oriya, Saba and Dudu, as well as six grandchildren: Bundi, Selkie, Maya, Luna, Cosimo and Luca.
