Iain Douglas-Hamilton

At the age of 23, Douglas-Hamilton moved to Tanzania to live in the wild in Lake Manyara National Park, where he carried out the first scientific study of the social interactions of the African elephant[2]. From that study came his hypothesis, rooted in behavioural ecology, that elephant movements could hold the key to understanding their reactions to their changing environments. Douglas-Hamilton argues that collecting and analysing large amounts of data on elephant locations and migrations can lead to insights into their choices, and therefore assist in their protection against rising threats, including poaching and human-wildlife conflict. Douglas-Hamilton's work is described in the book Among the Elephants written together with his wife Oria, and by Peter Matthiessen in his book The Tree Where Man Was Born.

In an interview years later, Iain said about his time in Manyara - “Nobody had lived with wildlife in Africa and looked at them as individuals yet. I was incredibly lucky to have had the chance to be the first person to do that with elephants.”[7]

From 1980 - 82, Douglas-Hamilton moved to Uganda where he was made Honorary Chief Park Warden amid the chaos after Idi Amin’s fall. Douglas-Hamilton was in charge of anti poaching activities under a project to rehabilitate Uganda's three game parks that was jointly financed by the United Nations and the European Community. His plane was hit several times by gunfire from Sudanese troops who had been poaching animals in Kidepo National Park in northern Uganda.  In Murchison Falls, Douglas-Hamilton lived in the restored Queen Mother Lodge originally built for the visit of Queen Mother Elizabeth in the 1950s. In 2022, Douglas-Hamilton returned to Uganda for the first time in forty years as part of a cross-border mission in collaboration with Northern Rangelands Trust and Uganda wildlife authorities, to collar elephants and investigate how they moved and overlapped with local communities. [8]

Douglas-Hamilton moved to Kenya with his family where he continues his conservation work today. In 1993, Douglas-Hamilton started Save the Elephants in order to create an effective and flexible NGO dedicated specifically to elephants. He continues to provide key research findings to the international community about poaching and human-elephant conflict. He serves on the data review task force of the African Elephant Specialist Group of IUCN, and the Technical Advisory Group for the Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants Programme. He also conducts regular lecture tours and works with the media to awareness of elephants. Additionally, Douglas-Hamilton has spoken at Universities, Zoological Societies, Embassies and private fundraising functions throughout Europe and America. His chief research interest is to understand elephant choices by studying their movements.

A skilled pilot, Douglas-Hamilton initially developed techniques to monitor widespread elephant movements from the air. In the early 1970s, he designed study methods that would allow for comprehensive and replicable surveys of elephant families from low-flying aircraft, which would at the same time allow large population counts to be undertaken for the first time. Between 1976 and 1979, Douglas-Hamilton worked on a joint IUCN /WWF Elephant Survey and Conservation Programme, which surveyed African elephant populations in 34 countries to produce scientific data to help shape policy recommendations for the species' protection[9]. Around the same time, working for IUCN, Douglas-Hamilton undertook research to map out the scale of the world ivory trade, its value, and its regulations. Meanwhile, he continued to direct aerial surveys of elephant populations into the 1980s, including in Uganda, Tanzania and the Central African Republic.

Douglas-Hamilton's aerial surveys, coupled with research coming from other studies, began to show for the first time the scale of the poaching crisis that was sweeping Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, as demand for ivory from Asia, in particular from Japan, grew. From 1980 to 1982, Douglas-Hamilton was made Honorary Chief Park Warden in Uganda. Years of poaching and political turmoil, during and after the reign of dictator Idi Amin, had taken its toll on Uganda’s national parks - once some of Africa’s finest national parks.

By 1980, most of Uganda’s elephants had been killed and were down from a probable 20,000 to an estimated 1,600 elephants and declining rapidly. Douglas-Hamilton was then working on a project for the United Nations Development Programme as an anti-poaching advisor to Uganda’s national parks. There, he designed air and ground patrols against poachers, many from Sudan, where civil war was raging and poached elephant ivory could be sold to raise money to buy weapons. On occasion, Douglas-Hamilton was shot at as he carried out his work[10].

His work in Uganda helped to stem the loss of elephants to poachers, and allowed him to propose ways that poachers could be stopped in other parts of Africa, using the methods he developed in Uganda. Douglas-Hamilton's estimates, drawn from his research and that of others, suggested that the population of African elephants across the continent of at least 1.3 million individuals in 1979 had been reduced to less than half, or around 600,000, by 1989[11].

These statistics illustrated to the world the scale of what became known as the elephant holocaust. Regulation of the trade was attempted, via the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species, but eventually it was globally accepted that a ban should be enforced to stem the loss of illegally killed elephants. Douglas-Hamilton was among Africa's leading conservationists who argued for this position. It is widely accepted that the ban worked, and elephant populations, especially savannah populations, began to recover.

The first 20 years of Douglas-Hamilton's work had illustrated that close scientific study of elephant populations, coupled with surveys of their ranges and movements, could help to mould policies that could protect them from external changes. To build on this work, in 1993 Douglas-Hamilton founded Save The Elephants, a charity registered in the UK and headquartered in Nairobi. Its mission - "to secure a future for elephants" by preserving the environments in which the animals live and encouraging a tolerant relationship between elephant and human populations.

Save the Elephants main research station is in Samburu National Reserve in northern Kenya. In 2010, Douglas-Hamilton almost lost the camp when floods completely decimated the research facility and nearby tourist lodges, including Elephant Watch Camp, with beds, tents, computers and vital research documentation submerged in mud and strung up in the treetops.[12]

At a  second research station in the Sagalla community in Tsavo, southeastern Kenya, Save the Elephants’ Human-Elephant Coexistence team is investigating ways for people to live in harmony with elephants in an increasingly crowded landscape.  

Since its inception, the organisation, under the direction of Douglas-Hamilton, has conducted research on elephants across Africa and has increased public awareness of the many dangers that threaten elephants and the habitats in which they live. Fundamental to his work at STE, Douglas-Hamilton pioneered GPS tracking of elephants in Africa, which has become a standard and widely emulated survey technique; it also guides the deployment of rangers to protect vulnerable and key elephant populations[13].  In 2007 Douglas-Hamilton partnered with Google Earth to show elephant movement in real time via satellite images.

Collection of scientific data continues to drive Douglas-Hamilton's work with Save the Elephants, both with the aerial surveys that he pioneered early in his career, and increasingly with modern technology including tracking collared elephants by GPS and satellites. Save the Elephants has since its formation been studying herds resident or migratory to Samburu National Reserve, a cohort of roughly 1000 individuals. Hundreds of elephants have been darted and fitted with collars carrying chips that communicate via satellites or mobile telephone networks with the charity's computer databases.

The elephants of Samburu are now one of the best-studied elephant populations in the world, with detailed histories of almost 1,000 individuals and their interactions from more than 25 years of research. Data from their behaviour and population dynamics have allowed scientists to understand the impacts of the ivory poaching crisis on populations across Africa[14].  From the initial collaring and monitoring of herds in Samburu, Douglas-Hamilton and Save the Elephants have gone on to use the same methods to study elephant populations across Africa. In 2016, Douglas-Hamilton announced that Save the Elephants had tracked the first ever elephant bull to cross into Somalia in more than two decades. [15]

Alongside its focus on data collection, Douglas-Hamilton has directed Save the Elephants to increase its work on reducing the conflict between growing human populations and elephant herds. Save the Elephants' Human-Elephant Coexistence program is run by Dr. Lucy King, who completed her doctorate demonstrating elephants' instinctive fear of honey bees under the guidance and mentorship of Douglas-Hamilton[16]. The project utilizes Beehive Fences, with beehives occupied by African bees, to reduce the problem of elephants destroying crops on small farms in Africa and Asia.

In 2013, Save the Elephants launched the Elephant Crisis Fund in partnership with the US-based Wildlife Conservation Network  to provide flexible and responsive support to NGOs combatting the ivory trade, promoting human-elephant coexistence, and protecting elephant landscapes. The Elephant Crisis Fund has disbursed more than $34m to hundreds of organisations in more than 40 countries.

In his role as Founder and President of Save the Elephants, Douglas-Hamilton continues to oversee field projects including elephant surveys, radio-tracking, community conservation projects, and ivory studies, wildlife protection, scientific publication, and international representation.