You might not expect that the grandson of a Scottish duke, and the son of a World War II Spitfire pilot, would become the lead advocate for the protection of the African elephant, but Iain Douglas-Hamilton became just that. He started his career at Oxford University studying zoology. That was in 1965. It was the era when zoological opportunities were being snapped up by the likes of Jane Goodall (chimpanzees), Dian Fossey (gorillas), George Schaller (Lions), and Hans Kruuk (Hyenas), but no-one had yet claimed elephants. Iain Douglas-Hamilton made them his own. It was to be his life’s work, right up to his death on December 8, 2025, at the age of 83, in his beloved Kenya.
Iain Douglas-Hamilton came from the new school of thought about the study of animals; that was, the study of them in their own environment, rather than in zoos or laboratories. It meant he spent his life on safari, but with field-glasses and notebooks rather than rifles, the choice of his forebears.
Gradually he got to know his elephants as individuals, each with their own particular quirks. This took time and infinite patience, which he seemed to have in abundance. Anwar, a young male fascinated with cars. Frank, a bull who loved mountaineering. Monsoon, another mountaineer who liked to take her calves along for the ride. Alpine, a female who often adopted orphans. And Boadicea, who forced him to shin up trees and tried to kill him. However, it was when he acquired a small Cessna plane that his true calling began. That plane enabled him to begin counting, accurately, elephant numbers across large areas of East Africa, and it highlighted the frightening level of damage that ivory poachers were causing to the elephant populations.
The numbers were horrifying. The censuses showed Africa’s elephant population crashing from 1.3 million in 1979 to 600,000 in 1989; half the population killed in less than ten years.
In 1980, Iain Douglas-Hamilton was invited to become honorary chief warden for Uganda’s three national parks. There, he masterminded the creation of air and ground patrols to fight poaching gangs, many of which operated from neighbouring Sudan. The poachers often reacted by using their semi-automatic weapons to try and shoot down his plane. Despite these attacks, he persevered and managed to increase the elephant population in these parks from a few hundred to several thousand.
In 1993, he and his wife Oria founded the “Save the Elephants” organization, and began the job of doing just that. It worked. In Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, and later in Kenya and Tanzania, populations rose. However, the story still has a long way to go. Populations are still declining overall, and Iain Douglas-Hamilton’s work still continues.
One legacy that is particularly fascinating, and, ironically, was the eventual cause of his downfall, was the cultivation of bees as a deterrent against elephants. Few animals scare a full-grown elephant, but bees are among them. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, once he realized the connection between elephants and bees, began working with Kenyan farmers close to the Samburu National Park, where the “Save the Elephants” organization had its headquarters. The farmers had no great animosity toward their large neighbours, unless those neighbours invaded their fields and trampled and ate their crops. Douglas-Hamilton instituted a system that placed beehives at strategic distances around the farmers’ fields. This not only kept the elephants out, it gave the farmers an additional, and lucrative, source of income … honey.
In February 2023, Iain Douglas-Hamilton was attacked by a major swarm of bees. They almost killed him, partially because he threw himself over the body of his wife to protect her. He survived, but never really recovered from the long shadow of anaphylaxis. He will be sorely missed, although his work and his legacy continue under the direction of Oria.
I thought this story deserves to be told, even in this very abbreviated way. It also brought back fond memories of my own, comparatively brief, work in Kenya.
