Queen of elephants
Being the daughter of a famous zoologist Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Saba’s bond with the African wilds began at a very young age. Here in Colombo, the conservationist, wildlife presenter and award-winning wildlife filmmaker talks of her ‘wild’ experience
She is equally at ease at gala celebrations as she is in the remote, rugged and untamed wilderness not just in Africa but across the world.
This week, elegant and charming Saba DouglasHamilton, conservationist, wildlife presenter, award-winning wildlife filmmaker, co-director of her family’s eco-tourism business, wife and mother of three little daughters, kept her audience riveted with her tales of the wild before, not jetting off, but being jolted and shaken over rutty tracks in the Uda Walawe and Yala National Parks.
It was on Tuesday night that gorgeous Saba all in blue stood in the tightly-packed Hilton Hotel ballroom glowing green to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society (WNPS), the third oldest society of its kind in the world. It is the WNPS that is credited with much of the conservation work in Sri Lanka including being catalysts in the declaration of many of the National Parks.
Virgo, Babylon, Matt, Rommel, Anwar, Boadicea……the names come quickly from Saba, tinged with sadness, as she reveals in an in-depth interview with the Sunday Times on her life and work that “some of my favourites are dead”. These are just a few of the many wild elephants this conservationist has been long associated with from the time she was a babe in the arms of her mother.
The daughter of famous zoologist Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the Founder of Save the Elephants (STE) who is acclaimed for conducting the first-ever behavioural studies of wild African elephants, Saba heads her father’s charity while also running the family’s luxury tented eco-lodge ‘Elephant Watch Camp’ where she has pioneered the concept of conservation tourism.
While STE, a research non-governmental organization, has as its base the Samburu National Reserve, lying in the lowlands just north of Mount Kenya in Kenya, Elephant Watch Camp, which Saba runs with husband Frank Pope, nestles along the banks of the Ewaso Nyiro River in the reserve itself.
“The STE team can individually recognise about 1,000 elephants and have been monitoring them closely since 1997. For ease of reference each elephant family is named after a category, like the ‘Storms’, ‘Winds’, ‘Acacias’ or ‘Native Americans’,” says Saba, explaining that individuals bear names such as Tempest, Harmattan, Polyacantha or Sioux.
What makes these wild elephants special is that they are part of one of the biggest remaining freeroaming populations in Kenya that move in and out of the Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves at will, ranging vast distances across the wild frontier of the Ewaso ecosystem in the Northern Rangelands, she points out.
Turning the spotlight on the profiles of some of her favourites, Saba says that Babylon (from the Biblical Towns), was the oldest and most beautiful matriarch in Samburu, so tall and broad in body that from a distance she looked like a bull. “Her wisdom and guidance steered her family through many crisis, and for over 20 years nurtured the brave but broken bodied Babel, a crippled female with a shattered back leg and twisted spine. Sadly, Babel succumbed to the devastating drought of 2009. We think Babylon was killed by poachers after a long drought in 2017, but the rest of her family survived and are thriving.”
“Gorgeous” was Matt, a mature bull whom they saw in the Samburu Reserve only when he was in musth. Named after the great Mattew’s Range of mountains, he would sail in like a battleship, after decent rains, oozing secretions from his swollen temple glands that were irresistible to female elephants. One of his last paramours was Blizzard’s teenage daughter, whom he guarded and mated with over a three-day period. Once he was sure the oestrus window had passed, he moved on to lovers new, says Saba, adding that he died a few months ago at the age of 52.
Dubbing Matt one of Kenya’s most distinguished “elephant elders”, she remembers him fondly for keeping the researchers on their toes and his Houdini-like skills at shredding and escaping the tracking collar that kept him in the spotlight.
The list is long – 17-yearold Habiba whose entire adult family died at the hands of poachers leaving her an orphan; Rommel who made the researchers’ hair stand on end who during a losing battle with Abe Lincoln took out his frustrations on one of their vehicles; and clumsy Anwar who plays with their cars.
For some such as Habiba with her distinctive wrinkle in her right ear, the tale continues as the matriarch of her brothers and sisters, but for others like Rommel, whose neck was too big to fit into the collar, the chapter has ended. He is missing-inaction, presumed dead.
The clever Chuck Yeager, Sarara, Malasso and others, Saba laughs, are savvy enough to realize the “huge advantage” of being near the STE and Elephant Watch camps “venturing where few others dare” to roam near human settlements where trees abound to enjoy feasts of succulent seeds. “A high-risk, high-gain strategy that reaps great rewards and keeps us all on our toes.”
For Saba and her family too, risk and danger are nothing new but never has she dreamt of abandoning her life or her work in the wild…….being charged by “enormous” elephants very similar to Tyrannosaurus rex while being seated in an open-topped Land Rover as a child; being bitten by a carpet viper while on a camel safari when she was 18, having to have a pressure bandage on her leg and electric shocks from the coil in the engine of a Suzuki until medical help could be reached and what she is reluctant to talk about, being attacked by “very violent heavily-armed criminals” when her eldest daughter was just two years old and she herself was seven months pregnant with twins, are just a few such incidents.
The carpet viper experience – extreme pain and near-death – which nearly cost her one foot where those accompanying her believed that the electric shocks would change the charge of the ions and denature the enzyme in the poison which “am not sure worked”, taught her a lesson. “I learned what my body was capable of enduring and became better at handling panic, fear and physical pain or discomfort,” she says simply.
Saba cannot recall when her interest in wild things began, only that “I’ve been aware from the beginning of the importance of having compassion for all life, which I feel is increasingly important in the modern world”.
Her first love had been their pet genet cats and mongoose when she was very little and then, of course, her early immersion in the elephant-world which stimulated a lifelong passion that led her to work for a decade with the BBC (having been talent-spotted to be a TV presenter and producer of wildlife documentaries including ‘This Wild Life’ and the ‘Big Cat Diaries’).
Born in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, ‘seven’ seems to be her own individual number, for she had come into this world at 7 p.m. on June 7, on the seventh day of the week, becoming the seventh grandchild. And so came her name which means seven in Kiswahili (Swahili).
Six weeks old was Saba, when her mother Oria introduced her to one-tusked Virgo, from a herd of 400 elephants her father was studying in the Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania. Eighteen-year-old Virgo, unafraid of humans, had stretched out her trunk, taken a long sniff and then introduced her own calf.
The bond between Saba and elephants was sealed forever and her passion extends to anything and everything wild including polar bears, black rhinos, apes, amphibians and more.
Life went on and after she had children (daughters Selkie and twins Luna and Mayian), she had gone back to the conservation cause with a vengeance, basing her family in Samburu.
The fascination for elephants has been all consuming for her “because they are so much like us” but also because they are such drama queens, says Saba, describing how they do everything – love, joy, grief, anger, lust – on a “big” scale. “It makes us look boring in comparison.”
As she continues to wage war against the poaching of elephants for ivory and the fragmentation of landscapes which diminish natural habitats and cause competition with humans for common resources for all wild animals, a new and personal realization has dawned for her.
“I realized my children had adapted to life in the bush when their baby soft feet, the toes I’d wiggled so often and soles kissed, suddenly developed a raspy quality, a bit like sandpaper, from walking everywhere barefoot. I remember holding one of their little feet in my hand feeling such nostalgia for lost babyhood. Instead of howling at a thorn, now they simply scuff their feet in the sand and walk on,” she says.
Most probably Saba Douglas-Hamilton’s legacy will live on, with the conservation torch being held high by her three daughters as she sees “a love of open spaces and animals seeping into the children’s souls…… mostly with my eldest, who tends to go misty-eyed at the beauty of an African sunset or moon rise. By loving it she will fight to protect it, in her own way and time. It might break her heart at times, but if we don’t have people willing to stand up for what is being lost then it will disappear without a murmur as the natural world is buried under concrete”.
(Please see www.sundaytimes.lk for the full article)