Out of Africa, the TV star juggling a JUMBO job and 3 kids (helped by her ninja nanny!)
IHAD always wondered what would happen if one just sat in the path of an elephant,’ muses Saba Douglas-Hamilton in her silken, post-colonial tones. On a recent wildlife shoot in Namibia, the conservationist found out.
After bedding down to sleep in a dry river bed one night, she woke up suddenly in terror.
‘There was this huge bull elephant walking along the edge of the riverbank,’ she says.
‘I saw him coming towards me and thought, “My God, there’s absolutely nowhere I can go, I’m just going to have to lie here and play dead”. He came right up and towered above me and I really did think, “This is it. He’s going to smell me, kneel on me and then tusk me”.’
Instead, though, the elephant reached out its trunk, carefully smelt Douglas-Hamilton from head to toe, stood for a moment and walked away.
‘I felt like my heart was going to explode out of my chest. Firstly with relief but secondly with understanding that this elephant, in its grace, had allowed me to live. He had a choice. He could have done anything to me, but he didn’t.’
She laughs at the memory. ‘It was an extraordinary moment.’
Perhaps that particular creature realised what many millions of BBC viewers already know – that Douglas-Hamilton is on the elephants’ side.
With a brace of wildlife documentaries under her belt, including Big Cat Diary and The Secret Life of Elephants, as well as her tireless conservation work in Kenya and her campaigns against the ivory trade, there is little doubt about where Douglas-Hamilton’s heart lies.
Indeed, growing up barefoot in the African bush, the daughter of worldrenowned Scottish elephant expert Dr Iain Douglas-Hamilton and his Kenyan-Italian wife Oria, she had little choice. She reflects: ‘I can honestly say I never remember a time in my life without elephants.
‘I met my first elephant when I was six weeks old and they have been a huge part of my life since then. Being from a family of elephant researchers, every toy was an elephant, every picture on the wall was an elephant, the story books were about elephants. We lived and dreamed elephants.’
Her parents, she says, imbued with her with a deep love and respect for wild animals. ‘Having grown up with my parents as scientists, watching elephants and watching their behaviour and how they interacted with each other, I absorbed a lot of that, just by naturally being around them. I was able to take that skill to any
other animals I worked with as a film maker. It was a wonderful tool to have.’
Although many TV viewers remember her as the young, sparkly-eyed wildlife presenter in fetching safari gear and African bangles, today Douglas-Hamilton is a mother of three, with a sevenyear-old and four-year-old twins with her husband Frank Pope, and the pair’s chaotic life in the Kenyan bush was documented last year for a BBC series, This Wild Life.
The family live at Elephant Watch camp, at Samburu National Reserve, a luxury safari camp which Douglas-Hamilton took over from her mother last year.
There, zebras canter past the breakfast table, monkeys peer from the trees as you wake and even lions have been known to wander into the middle of the camp.
MASTERMINDING the running of Elephant Watch while being filmed was somewhat challenging. She admits: ‘It was quite stressful at times. It certainly has an impact on one’s life.
‘It did enormously increase my workload, having to run the camp, look after all our guests at the level they expected and also keep an eye on my kids and then deal with the film crew, but it was a great experience.’
Running the camp, where pampered tourists can experience a slice of the African wilderness – albeit with china teacups and luxury beds – has been a gear shift for the TV presenter, who spent years travelling the world presenting wildlife documentaries.
‘You have to make sure everything is working, that you’re doing all the maintenance, that the pump for the well hasn’t broken and the cars haven’t got flat tyres and then the rains come and roofs are leaking – there’s a lot of stuff like that you have to do,’ she says.
‘But what’s magical about it is when you wake up in the morning and you’re right there, with nothing but black mosquito netting between you and the wild world.
‘You wake up under these wonderful trees with the rodents and the birds and the reptiles and the monkeys skittering in the trees around you. It’s very special.’
Life in the African bush, then, may not always be glamorous, but there are touches of luxury in Douglas Hamilton’s life.
She keeps a close eye on the local wildlife through a pair of Swarovski binoculars and last month she attended the wedding of Jecca Craig, former girlfriend of Prince William, to Jonathan Baillie, at the Lewa estate in Kenya. William, among other well-heeled guests, was in attendance.
Then there are Douglas-Hamilton’s somewhat unorthodox childcare arrangements for her three children – Selkie and the twins, Luna and Mayian.
‘When we first moved there was a rabid leopard who went barrelling through a nearby town and badly mauled 13 people and I was worried there could be a rabies outbreak,’ she explains.
‘I realised I needed somebody around the children who knows what they are doing and can teach the kids about the bush. So I employed this wonderful Samburu warrior named Mporian to come and help.’ As, one presumes, you do. ‘I call him my ninja nanny,’ she says.
‘He treats the children a little bit like his livestock. He herds them around and teaches them which insects are dangerous, how to avoid scorpions, where the hornbills nest, what plants to eat. All these kind of things. They’re savvy now.’
She is desperate for her children to have the same, close to nature childhood as she did, and is keen to keep them at home for as long as possible rather than have them shipped off to boarding school as she was, at the age of seven.
Years later, she described her experiences there as being ‘like a prison’, and she did not want that for her children.
‘At the moment we’re home schooling them, because it’s our only option,’ she says. ‘We have a wonderful tutor who comes to help and she’s teaching them the British curriculum.
‘The kids are loving it. I’m going to try to do that for as long as possible – certainly for the next two years or so – and then we’ll see.
‘We’re just going to take it day by day. I don’t want to send them off to boarding school. Not yet.’
Being a mother, she says, has changed her focus on life. She adds: ‘I think the biggest thing that motherhood teaches you is that its shifts the centre of your universe from yourself to your children. It’s incredibly liberating actually, in that way.
You realise that as a mother your children are all-important and you have these little souls in your hands that you are shaping. It’s a huge responsibility.
‘I have also learned that I had no idea I had such a capacity for love. I thought when my first one was born I thought I could never love anything more than that child. Then two more arrived and I feel the same about all of them.’
Her new, more domesticated life means there is little time left for relaxation. She says: ‘I try to carve time out, but it’s at unusual times. I had my Christmas about two weeks ago. I went to my mother’s farm and just swam every day and played with my children and relaxed. ‘It was very simple and very low-key, nothing exciting about it, just getting away, feeling a bit stronger physically and just relaxing. Away from people.’ Later this month, Douglas Hamilton will tour Scotland talking about the other great love of her life, elephants. She can talk endlessly, and eloquently, about elephants, about their ability to behave like soap opera characters, about the fight for elephant conservation and the battle against the ivory trade, and of their fierce intelligence. ‘Elephants do everything on such a big scale,’ she says. ‘When they’re angry it’s on a big scale, when they’re happy, you can’t imagine anything happier. They’re tremendously expressive and very intelligent and I think that makes them particularly interesting to us. They share complex emotions with us like empathy and compassion and grief. ‘I know of one elephant researcher who witnessed a mother elephant carrying its dead baby round on its trunk for several days after it died, unwilling to let it go. It’s these characteristics that make them so akin to us and so fascinating.’
SHE is also fascinated by the wildlife of Scotland, and the Douglas-Hamilton family still has a home on the tiny island of Raasay, off Skye, where she spent many happy days during her university years at St Andrews.
‘I love Scotland, having that sense of space and wilderness,’ she says. ‘You can just get completely lost there in the wild. I used to go to my grandmother’s croft on Raasay when I was at St Andrews and we would see otters and deer and eagles and seals. Quite often you would see deer walking right past the windows of the croft.’
She says that if she were ever to move back to the Uk, it would be to Scotland, and most likely to Raasay. How her controversial views on Scottish wildlife would go down, however, is unclear.
‘I would try to persuade them to reintroduce wolves to Scotland, but I don’t know if people would agree with me,’ she says, somewhat mischievously.
‘I think having apex predators is always very good for improving bio-diversity in an area, and certainly it would help enormously with re-growing some of the forest areas and keeping the red deer population down.
‘obviously it’s not great for sheep, but there are ways to get around that. Perhaps it’s time to cut down on the number of sheep and actually start looking at re-wilding vast parts of Scotland.’
I tentatively suggest there might be a fair bit of opposition from the Scottish farming community to such a proposal.
‘I’m sure there would,’ she says. ‘But imagine if you could get it back to the days when you had all the original animals there. It would be absolutely magnificent. But then, that is my angle on life.’
And it really is. Douglas-Hamilton has dedicated her life to animals, and to wildlife conservation, and shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.
‘For me it’s quite a spiritual connection with animals. I have that feeling of going out into nature and getting a tremendous sense of peace and calm and sanity when I’m there and with these creatures.’
Curious bull elephants included.