Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a world-renowned expert on elephants who was one of the first to study their social behavior in the wild and who dedicated his later years to fighting poaching, died on Monday at his home in Nairobi, Kenya. He was 83.
His daughter Dudu Douglas-Hamilton confirmed the death, but did not specify a cause.
Mr. Douglas-Hamilton was charged at by elephants, shot at by poachers and nearly killed by a swarm of bees. Throughout, he retained a sense of humor and an awareness that he was leading a charmed life and accomplishing work he deeply believed in.
He came from a storied, aristocratic British family and was an expert zoologist. But he had a knack for boiling down complicated subjects so that they could be communicated to just about anyone. He became one of the most visible and passionate advocates for protecting elephants and went on to found his own conservation organization, Save the Elephants.
“Anyone who studies elephants — and certainly it happened to me — becomes intensely aware that you’re dealing with a sentient species, a species where the individuals are thinking their own thoughts,” he said in “A Life Among Elephants,” a documentary film on his life released last year.
Elephants grieve, they have long life spans, they learn from their elders and they form complex social units, led by strong females, he said. “The thing about elephants,” he added, “is that they have a lot in common with human beings.”
Jane Goodall, a lifelong friend who died this year, met Mr. Douglas-Hamilton in the 1960s, when he was living in Tanzania and beginning his groundbreaking work on elephant behavior.
“Immediately, we talked as people who understood who animals are,” she said in the documentary. “There’s no question that Iain’s legacy will last forever. It was he who brought the elephant as a sentient being to the attention of the world.”
Iain Douglas-Hamilton was born on Aug. 16, 1942, in Dorset, England, the younger of two sons of David Douglas-Hamilton, a Scottish nobleman, amateur boxer and World War II fighter pilot who died in a plane crash when Iain was not quite 2.
Iain’s mother, Prunella (Stack) Douglas-Hamilton, was a well-known figure in her own right. Born in India and inspired by what she learned from yoga, she became a pioneer in the women’s fitness movement and went on to lead an international women’s organization with thousands of members.
Iain grew up in England and Scotland and attended the same boarding school, Gordonstoun, that King Charles III did. He took up zoology at the University of Oxford, thinking he would study lions. But when he was 23, he moved to Tanzania to focus on the wild elephants at Lake Manyara National Park.
It was there that he began building an extensive dossier on every elephant he encountered, taking photos of their faces, tracing their lineages and mapping their territory.
At first, he assigned them numbers. But as he studied the herds more closely, learning to recognize individuals by the distinctive shape of their ears, he gave each one a name. Soon, he was on a first-name basis with hundreds of elephants.
Mr. Douglas-Hamilton made breakthroughs in deciphering elephant communication and understanding the choices they made as they moved across vast stretches of terrain in various social groups. He was one of the first wildlife researchers to fly around in a small plane and count animals from the air, leading to aerial surveys across the continent.
In 1969, he dropped in at a party in Nairobi and met Oria Rocco, an Italian photographer born in Kenya.
“He was quite taken by me, so we started dancing, but he wasn’t a very good dancer,” she remembered. “And then I said, ‘Well, what are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘Well, I do elephants.’ ‘You do elephants? What does that mean?’”
She added: “It was the first time that I’d met somebody who was actually studying elephants and not shooting elephants.”
The two married in 1971 and moved to Tanzania, where Mr. Douglas-Hamilton continued his studies. They soon had two daughters whom they gave Swahili names: Saba, which means seven, and Dudu, which means bug.
As poaching surged in the late 1970s, Mr. Douglas-Hamilton shifted from research to defense. What the world was witnessing, he said, was “an elephant holocaust.” He went to Uganda, as it was emerging from a war, to muster a force that would guard the country’s elephant population, which had been decimated. In 1989, he helped persuade the Kenyan government to burn its stockpile of seized ivory — a photogenic event that grabbed attention around the world.
Throughout it all, he continued his research, working with Kenyan veterinarians to tranquilize elephants and fit them with collars that transmitted radio signals. He kept his eye on elephants as far away as Mali, where he was fascinated by a remote herd that trekked particularly long distances to watering holes.
Around 2010, Mr. Douglas-Hamilton started hearing distressing things again. An unusual number of elephants across Africa were dying from unnatural causes. It was the first sign of another epic slaughter.
The reason: ivory trinkets. An insatiable demand was being driven by China’s enormous new middle class. Some of Africa’s most majestic parks were becoming war zones, as a motley assortment of rebel groups, heavily armed gangs and soldiers from governments backed by the United States blasted apart elephant herds, sometimes killing calves and their mothers from military helicopters.
The poachers might get $100 for a pair of tusks. But by the time that ivory hit the streets in China, it could be worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Mr. Douglas-Hamilton swung into action to fight the trade. He organized a campaign to change attitudes at the source — in China. He helped bring Yao Ming, China’s N.B.A. basketball star, and other Chinese celebrities to East Africa, persuading them to become ambassadors for the cause.
During his last years, Mr. Douglas-Hamilton spent most of his time in Kenya, often at Elephant Watch Camp, his family’s game lodge in the Samburu National Reserve, a beautiful stretch of northern Kenya where his research center was based.
One evening in 2023, as he and Ms. Douglas-Hamilton were strolling on another property they owned in Naivasha, Kenya, they were attacked by a swarm of bees. When Mr. Douglas-Hamilton tried to shield her with his body, he was stung many times, went into anaphylactic shock and nearly died. He never quite got his strength back.
In addition to their daughter Dudu, Mr. Douglas-Hamilton is survived by his wife; their daughter Saba Douglas-Hamilton; and six grandchildren. His daughters and Frank Pope, his son-in-law, are continuing Mr. Douglas-Hamilton’s work at the research center and the family’s lodge, and through outreach efforts across Africa.
“If any elephants survive in Africa today, it’s thanks to this man,” read the headline in a recent article in the British newspaper The Telegraph.
Mr. Douglas-Hamilton’s final effort was trying to figure out how to protect wildlife as climate change and population growth pressed more people and elephants together.
“The next challenge will be to coexist, for human development and animal development to go side by side,” he said. “I have a side of me that’s really quite optimistic.”
Jeffrey Gettleman is an international correspondent based in London covering global events. He has worked for The Times for more than 20 years.
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