On a remote nature reserve in Kenya, an Anglo-African family is helping preserve local wildlife by living alongside it—and inviting guests to do the same.
Saba Douglas-Hamilton and I were sitting beneath the acacia trees beside her lodge in the Kenyan bush, talking about how, while filming in a dried-up riverbank, she narrowly escaped being crushed by an enraged elephant. Tall, tanned, and barefoot, with windswept hair and watchful eyes, the wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster looked every inch the fearless conservationist.
As she spoke, a hefty rustling in some nearby foliage signaled the arrival of an elephant. “It’s Anwar, one of the teenage bulls,” she whispered. We watched in silence as Anwar feasted on foot-long seed pods from a sausage tree just yards away. “They’re mostly friendly,” Saba said, “but there’s a bit of turf war that goes on between us.”
Saba has crossed the world making wildlife documentaries for the BBC, and is a well-known personality in the U.K. Last year, she and her environmentalist husband, Frank Pope, gave up their base in Nairobi to take over Elephant Watch Camp, her parents’ safari lodge in the Samburu National Reserve, in central Kenya—a move recorded in a BBC TV series. The show followed the dramas of raising children in the wilderness while running an eco-lodge and conservation station along the way. Saba’s Scottish father, the zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, and her Italian-French mother, Oria, have been living and working in Samburu for over 20 years. Since the 1960s— long before it was fashionable—they have been devoting their lives to African elephants, which at the time were being slaughtered for ivory in the thousands. The couple’s pioneering work is credited with helping bring about the international ivory-trade ban of 1989. In the 1990s, Iain set up Save the Elephants, a charity and research center on the Samburu reserve; then, in 2001, Oria opened Elephant Watch Camp, which aimed to involve visitors in the nonprofit’s work. After a poaching crisis beginning in 2008 that decimated Kenya’s elephants, numbers have at last begun to stabilize—in part because of the family’s decades-long monitoring project. The elephants of Samburu are now one of Africa’s best-studied, and most protected, animal populations.
