Saba's life with elephants
Saba Douglas-Hamilton, conservationist, public speaker and award-winning TV presenter of wildlife TV series including Big Cat Diary, The Secret Life of Elephants and This Wild Life, will be at Eden Court on Thursday (Mar 5). She will be sharing animal stories and intimate behind the scenes tales of life in Kenya with her young family, Sielke and young twins Luna and Mayian Pope and husband Frank Pope, a maritime archaeologist. At the event the audience will also have a chance to ask Saba questions - below she answers Margaret Chrystall's!
1 Your dad Iain is a respected elephant conservationist – also expert in their behaviour – in Kenya. How young were you when you first remember seeing or being aware of elephants?
What I remember from the early years in Manyara National Park, Tanzania, where my dad was doing his initial research, was the constant presence of elephants in our lives – some friendly, and some rather ferocious. One female in particular, a sweet 18-year-old teenager called Virgo, was very habituated and seemed to be as curious about us as my dad was intent on her. She would come right up to our vehicle and extend her trunk out towards us in greeting. Quite often one of my parents would get out of the car in return, and walk towards her holding out a gardenia fruit as a gift.
My first encounter with Virgo was when I was just a babe in arms (six weeks old), when my mother presented me to her on foot. Virgo came forward, reached out her trunk, and sniffed me from head to toe to take in my scent. Then her calf peeked around her legs to investigate. Of course I have no recollection of this early meeting beyond photographs, but I did get to know her when I was little older and she’s always had a special place in my heart.
However, the first really solid image of an elephant that is burned into my memory is of a ferocious female called Boadicea, who charged at us like a Spanish galleon, skidding to halt in a cloud of dust just before she hit the car. Being a small and sensible primate, I was suitably intimidated by her ear-splitting scream - honed by millions of years of evolution to terrify enemies into submission - and cowered respectfully in the back of my parents’ open Land Rover as she towered above us, peering down menacingly through her tusks! Over the years, she dented my dad’s vehicle several times, along with another wild family who didn’t particularly like hominids, called the Torone sisters,
Watching how my father acted around elephants, I absorbed a lot from his manner and movements, learning initially to conquer my fear and react appropriately, and then to read animal moods. His conservation philosophy and lifelong commitment to the elephant cause have influenced me profoundly. Animals are often far more afraid of us than we are of them, so one must never cross the line that forces them to run or fight. By learning this I began to appreciate the great courage it took for a matriarch like Boadicea to place herself between her family and danger, facing the threat head-on as her offspring escaped behind her. She was eventually shot by poachers, to our enormous loss, and when my family left Tanzania to return to Kenya, they took her skull with them which is still on the verandah of their house today.
2 I read that your name Saba means "seven" in Swahili but I don’t think you are a seventh child. So what is the significance of that seven?!
I was born on the 7th of June, at 7 o’clock in the evening, on the 7th day of the week and I am the 7th grandchild (on the Afro-Italo-Franco side of the family). My parents wanted me to be called Iassa – but the people who worked on my grandparents’ farm insisted I should be Saba (meaning "seven") and the name stuck.
3 You worked with your dad Iain presenting BBC documentary series, The Secret Life of Elephants, back in 2009 and at the family home in Samburu, Kenya. I know you have done so much TV work since that has taken you across the world to many different environments and highlighting many different species. But I wondered if that one had been particularly special because of the chance to work with your dad. What are your favourite memories of it?
When I started having kids I had to stop doing TV work, but before that I’d spent almost eight years filming many endangered species in their wild environments. And, over the years, I’ve worked with my father a lot through his charity, Save the Elephants, as it’s a cause close to my heart - so I continued to do so while raising children. (I was a trustee of STE until last year, but am now head of special projects and the chair of the advisory board as well as their media advisor). Filming Secret Life of Elephants (SLOE) with him was special because we share a great passion for elephants - especially interpreting behaviour - and wild places, and after many years working in far-flung locations it was great having an excuse to spend an extended period back home in Samburu hanging out with the elephants every day and really focusing on telling their stories. When you’re accepted into the heart of an elephant family, listening to the rasp of ears rubbing against skin, the soft pad of their footfall, smelling the scent of crushed herbs dancing on the wind, and watching the calves play around you, it is a privilege akin to swimming with wild dolphins.
Inevitably one can never capture the full sensations of this experience on screen, but we had some pretty spectacular moments while filming SLOE both on and off camera. One morning, one of the Save the Elephants research assistants, Daniel Lentipo, called me on the radio in a rather shaky voice. He’d just bumped into a bull called Rommel that we’d not seen for four years. His last encounter with Rommel had resulted in his vehicle being pounded into the ground and then ripped to pieces. Danile was lucky to escape with his life, let alone a few scratches. And he never got over it. At the time, Rommel had been in musth – a state of heightened sexuality and aggression that mature bulls enter into once a year – and had just lost a fight to an even bigger bull, Abe Lincoln, so, absolutely furious in defeat, he took it out on the researchers. Now, once again, Rommel was oozing secretions to indicate his aroused state, and was locked in combat with Leakey, another musth bull. The fight was huge, intense and dramatic, and happened right in front of me as I sat waiting for the crew. But just as the BBC camera car came racing in, one of Rommel’s tusks snapped off with an enormous CRACK and shot up into the air. Leakey turned and fled in a cloud of dust with Rommel in hot pursuit. It was the first time I’d ever seen such a drawn out, intense bull fight in Samburu, and I’ll never forget the despairing look of frustration on the cameraman’s face at having missed the shot!
4 Having been brought up so much in nature, you found your first experience of being sent away to boarding school a bit like being in prison, I have read. If you had to choose where to spend the rest of your life, would it still be outdoors first? If so, where. And where are some of the places that you would love to explore and sample for yourself?
Being sent off to boarding school in England at the age of 13 was a real shock to the system after our free and adventurous life in Kenya. Alone, in a foreign environment, we were suddenly met with sullen posters of pouty-faced pop-stars on bedroom walls, girlfriends wracked with anorexia, and endless discussion on what one could or could not wear. A far cry from what we thought about back home. Inevitably, I was teased mercilessly about my clothes – all hand-me-downs from generations of Kenyan kids (everything must’ve been at least 10 years out of date) – so I had learn fast how to be a chameleon. But I never lost my interest in nature or my loyalty for our very different way of life in Africa.
Later on, I attended an amazing international school in Wales called Atlantic College (AC), where I met people from hugely diverse backgrounds from across the world, all on scholarship, who were much more my "tribe". The college had a fantastic outward-bound programme – with Cliff Rescue as a community service – and through training expeditions in the mountains, exposed me to a wilder side of Britain that I really began to appreciate.
We also visited my grandmother’s croft on the Isle of Raasay in the inner Hebrides, and went climbing in the Cuillins which has been a passionate pursuit for generations of my Scottish family. My grandfather, David Douglas-Hamilton, leader of the Edinburgh 603 squadron during the Battle for Malta in WW2 (who was killed right at the end of the war doing air reconnaissance over Germany), apparently only ever wore his kilt when he climbed. Mountains make your spirits soar, and nothing beats hanging off a rock face with your climbing partner as eagles glide past at eye-level.
I do love the novelty of cities like Paris or New York for short periods of time, but what really speaks to my heart is open wilderness. The wilder, the better. Forests can also be incredible frontiers. Spending time in the Tai Forest, Cote d’Ivoire, filming Going Ape with the brilliant BBC producer Alistair Fothergill, was my first real experience of jungle. We were following a community of chimps, eating only what they ate or drank, to see how long we could last (although raw colobus meat was firmly off the menu in case of Ebola), and had to be extremely careful at all times to keep an eye on our bearings so as not to get lost from each other, even when we nipped behind a tree for a pee. The chimps would drum on great slabs of tree-root, then scream out their wild pant-hoots as they leapt off into the undergrowth with us racing after them. It was wildly exciting, but also one of the hardest physical experiences of my life.
At night, we’d sleep in hammocks strung between trees, and the few places we’d hung our clothes to dry would glow with luminescence where the fungi had been disturbed. Sometimes the forest floor looked like it had been scattered with stars. Years later, in Dzanga Sanga in the Central African Republic, I saw the Ba’aka pygmies use this same fungus in their spirit dances. On the darkest nights, without a moon, "animal spirits" would be sung into existence. As the dancers walked around us unseen on stilts with the fungus attached to their bodies, it looked like a collection of fireflies tumbling ever-forward into different animal forms.
I’m also passionate about the polar regions, and after Africa they would be my second choice as a place to settle, but perhaps my Scottish blood has become too thin after three generations in the tropics! My husband is always trying to persuade me to join him visiting the world’s largest living space, the deep ocean, but I’ve yet to get beneath the sunlit upper waters.
What lures me to a place more than anything is the presence of wildlife, so while I’ll always keep exploring the remoter regions of the Earth – like the Himalayas (to search for snow leopards), Borneo, or Papua New Guinea/Irianjaya (each of which is on my bucket list), I have to admit that above all my heart is most at home here in Africa where the wild things are.
5 You gave birth to your first daughter Sielke outside after walking in the mountains – probably much more natural and akin to what might have happened with humans 1000 years ago. Are there other areas of our lives that would benefit from a less "indoor" and sedentary way of doing things.
I was delighted to read the other day that Europeans have up to 4% Neanderthal DNA as part of their genetic stock, and I think mine must be at the higher end of the scale! In my opinion, pretty much everything is better done outside. Eating. Exercising. Working. Talking. Studying. Giving birth. Dreaming. I’ve not once had a night sleeping out under the stars that hasn’t been extraordinary.
Growing up is also something that is best done outdoors. You only need to take kids into a garden after they’ve been cooped up for a while to see the effect that nature has on them. You can feel their curiosity uncurling inside their heads, relieved by the green tangle of plant life and stimulated by the fresh air. Once they’ve burnt off their energy they get very mellow – quite the opposite to what happens when they’ve been sitting in front of screens of some sort. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than seeing my kids entertaining themselves in nature, and – although they are lured to a phone or tablet like moths to a flame when they see one – I know that nature speaks to their souls. (We are very strict – draconian in fact – about TV/iphone/ipads, and at the moment all are banned!).
It’s very much the same with adults. I think there is a frightening disconnect between many urban dwellers and the natural world, which, I believe, is most likely the cause of many of society’s ills. t is fascinating to watch the effect that nature has on the guests that come and stay at my family’s eco safari-lodge, Elephant Watch Camp, in Samburu National Reserve, north Kenya, that I’m currently managing. For many, the first day is pretty overwhelming with a rush of unfamiliar sensations. But by the evening of the second day, re-coloured by the landscape with a fine layer of dust, the layers of stress and fatigue begin to slough off, the senses are more acute, and everyone is visibly attuned to the sounds and smells of the animal life around them. By the third day, it’s like a butterfly has wriggled out of a chrysalis and is stretching out its wings to dry, ready to take flight. I believe that nature calms us down and soothes our souls. It is hugely important for our mental well-being. Far fewer people would be sick or on anti-depressants if they were simply able to get outside every day and take a walk down a beautiful country lane.
6 You studied social anthropology at university in St Andrews and I wondered if you have any plans to make TV programmes about human societies that fascinate you. How did those studies change you as a young woman – and what were/ are your particular interests there?
One of the great benefits of having born and brought up in Kenya is that I was exposed to many different tribes, cultures and languages from a very young age. I’ve always loved the diversity of Africa and believe that traditional knowledge is one of the most important parts of our heritage. In Africa, humans and wild animals have lived longer together, through the millennia, than anywhere else on earth. As our ancestors migrated out across the world they obliterated the naïve species they came across, but in Africa, thanks to a long co-existence with humans, wildlife continued to thrive (at least until the last 100 years or so).
So, I’d love to do a film on the people who still live in symbiosis with the natural world. But as Africa modernises, these cultures are disappearing fast, so it needs to be done sooner rather than later.
I wasn’t a particularly good student before university, but social anthropology caught my attention at St Andrew’s and I became very passionate about it. Few things give me more pride than having received a first class degree, but sadly one is never really allowed to talk about it! There, I’ve said it!
7 What is your favourite on-screen moment while filming programmes like This Wild Life and Big Cat Diaries?
We ran the full gamut of emotions filming This Wild Life – happy, sad, humorous and exciting – but one of the dramatic moment that really sticks out was coming across a lioness lying all alone on the riverbank when I was out with the kids on a game drive. Suddenly she snapped her head up and went into hunting mode, melting into the grass to stalk some antelope that had come to the river to drink.
I was whispering furiously to the kids to explain what was going on, as she slid past us using the vehicle as a screen, then froze, realigned herself, and took off at a fast trot to leap onto the back of a Grevy’s zebra stallion.
The kids were transfixed as they stared at the zebra whirling around frantically trying to unseat her, and then at the visceral slash of red at its throat. I wasn’t quite sure how they’d react, but on discussing it all they were very open to both sides of the story and totally understood how important it was for the lioness to feed her cubs. There was definite sympathy for the zebra too, all round, but when the lioness padded off to bring her cubs to the feast everyone felt it was a well -deserved meal. And the sight of extremely fat, happy lions made us all giggle at how similar the cubs’ tummies looked to those of the twins after their favourite meal.
8 What do you love to do for fun when the cameras are off and you are at home with your family?
The kids all love swimming, as do we. Frank recently came back with snorkel sets for each of them, and we love taking them to a shallow reef at the coast where they skitter around on the surface, eyes like saucers in their goggles, hooting and honking in delight through their snorkels at all the fish they see.
The twins are only three so they haven’t yet figured out how to stay afloat and breathe at the same time, without snorkels, so we have to keep an eye on them. But seeing them explore this other world is just fantastic, and I long for the day when we can do some proper wild-swimming with them which is Frank and my favourite activity.
9 If you had to name one animal to be your companion on an enforced solo desert island trip, what – or who – would it be?
A dolphin. It would help me catch fish, take me on trips to other islands and maybe even teach me a new language.
Saba Douglas Hamilton: A Life With Elephants is on Thursday (Mar 5) at 7pm at Eden Court.
