Conservationist who devoted his life to the study and preservation of the African elephant
The British scientist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who has died aged 83, became the world’s leading authority on the behaviour of African elephants and played a vital part in ensuring 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 licence, he flew his Piper Pacer bush plane from Nairobi down to Tanzania’s pocket-sized Lake Manyara national park. The challenge he had accepted at the age of 23 was how to solve the problem of 450 elephants confined in a space too small to support them.
For five years, having built a camp in an area renowned for its tree-climbing lions, he lived among Manyara’s elephants, first teaching himself to recognise them as individuals in order to make the first systematic study of their behaviour in the wild.
He was utterly fearless, a quality that stood him in good stead, as his work was not without risks. Often he was forced to climb trees to avoid being killed by angry elephants, such as the formidable matriarch he called Boadicea, and on three occasions his Land Rover was skewered by their tusks. But eventually they came to accept him, while remaining truly wild.
