Iain Douglas-Hamilton obituary | Zoology

British scientist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who has died aged 83, became the world’s leading authority on the behavior of African elephants and played a vital role in ensuring their conservation.

His efforts to save the African elephant began in 1965 when, an Oxford zoology graduate and just receiving his pilot’s license, he flew his Piper Pacer bush plane from Nairobi to the pocket-sized Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania. The challenge he accepted at the age of 23 was how to solve the problem of 450 elephants confined in a space too small to accommodate them.

For five years, after building a camp in an area renowned for its tree-climbing lions, he lived among the elephants of Manyara, initially teaching himself to recognize them as individuals in order to make the first systematic study of their behavior in the wild.

He was absolutely fearless, a quality that served him well, as his work was not without risks. Often he was forced to climb trees to avoid being killed by angry elephants, like the fearsome matriarch he called Boadicea, and on three occasions his Land Rover was skewered by their tusks. But they ended up accepting it, while remaining truly wild.

It was also during his stay in Manyara that Oria Rocco came to visit him from the family farm located on the shores of Lake Naivasha in Kenya. Oria not only fell in love with Manyara and its elephants: she stayed there and married the dashing young scientist in 1971 and they had two daughters, Saba and Dudu. The story of their early years together, Among the Elephants (1975), which became a bestseller, was illustrated by Oria’s stunning photographs – including a photo of her presenting Saba as a baby in the arms of a wild elephant cow and her calf.

Becoming the first scientist to study the social interactions of elephants, Iain came to believe that understanding their seasonal migratory movements was key to their conservation. But the growing threat of ivory poaching soon led him to devote the rest of his life to stemming the flow of tusks that was bleeding Africa dry.

Although elephant poaching was rampant in Africa, the price of ivory remained stable until 1969, but then suddenly exploded when tusks became a commodity, which could be stored and traded like gold. This proved disastrous for Africa’s large elephant herds, and Kenya became the first country to fully feel the effects of rising ivory prices when shifta – Somali poachers armed with semi-automatic weapons – invaded Tsavo National Park, the country’s largest elephant stronghold.

I first met Iain in the late 1970s and it was at his insistence that I went to Tsavo in 1988 to report for the Sunday Times on what became known as the Ivory Wars. By that time, 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 had begun carrying out pan-African aerial surveys which revealed for the first time the scale of the crisis. In 1980 he was made an honorary director in Uganda, where he set up air and ground patrols against Sudanese poachers who sometimes fired on his plane, and in 1988 he received the Order of the Golden Ark from Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands for alerting the world to the scale of elephant killings. He was appointed CBE in 2015.

It emerged that 90% of all ivory stockpiles had been obtained illegally, and in July 1989, Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi publicly burned a pyre of 12-ton tusks worth $6 million. The argument made by Iain and his fellow conservationists was so powerful that Cites (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) was forced to ban the international trade in ivory in 1990. The full story is told in Battle for the Elephants (1992), written by Iain and Oria.

Although the ban did not put a complete end to poaching, it provided valuable respite for Africa’s dwindling elephant herds, at a time when their numbers could once again increase. It was with this goal in mind that in 1993, Iain moved to Samburu National Park in northern Kenya and founded Save the Elephants, a conservation charity that works to ensure a future for the species by allowing it to co-exist alongside local communities. There, he pioneered satellite-collared elephant tracking techniques, an invaluable tool for increasing their protection and avoiding potential conflicts with humans.

Born in Donhead St Andrew, Wiltshire, Iain was the son of Lord David Douglas-Hamilton, who had commanded a squadron of Spitfires in the Second World War and was killed in an accident in 1944, and Prunella Stack, director of the Women’s Health and Beauty League, a fitness organization founded by his mother in the 1930s. He was educated at Gordonstoun School in Scotland and Oriel College from Oxford, where he earned a BSc in Biology and a PhD in Zoology before realizing his childhood dream of moving to Kenya.

In 2008, Iain almost failed at Samburu when he was charged by a cow elephant who then attempted to impale him as he lay on the ground. Somehow he escaped unscathed, with little damage except for a broken pair of glasses. In fact, it was not elephants that ended his life, but a swarm of bees that attacked him as he was returning home to Naivasha. He was flown to Cape Town for treatment, but never recovered.

He is survived by Oria, Saba and Dudu, as well as six grandchildren, Bundi, Selkie, Mayan, Luna, Cosimo and Luca.