Saba Douglas Hamilton’s life with the elephants

She grew up in an aristocratic family but left all that behind to camp in the bush with her three kids and fight for the future of the African elephant. Meet the woman who’s Wild at Heart

She spent big chunks of her childhood in Scotland and her university days were at St Andrews, but life for Saba Douglas Hamilton has been just a little different since.

As the great-granddaughter of the 13th Duke of Hamilton, blue blood may be in the family’s veins but it’s a passion for wildlife that runs through Saba’s.

Saba, 44, is a leading animal conservationist and presenter of upcoming 10-part BBC series This Wild Life about her Elephant Watch Camp in Sumburu, Kenya.

And it’s from the dusty heat there that she takes time to speak to The Sunday Post ahead of the series and a Scottish lecture tour.

Life for the family made up of Saba, husband Frank, five-year-old daughter Sielke and three-year-old twins Muma and Mayiam is certainly a bit different.

While here a walk in the park may end the day, for Saba and her family that walk is through open ground where they can look out for elephants.

“We’ll come back and have a shower from a bucket up a tree and then tuck them up in bed with their mosquito nets and tell them a story,” she says. “It’s a lovely way to end the day.”

Zebra and antelope are their neighbours.

Wild dogs abound, as well as lions, cheetahs and leopards in a bush country that hasn’t seen rain since last November.

“You always have to be very, very careful around the animals,” admits Saba. “You never put yourself in a position where you compromise them.

“You make sure you keep a respectful distance where they feel comfortable, yet close enough to get a good look. If you spend a lot of time around them you start to read the signs of their behaviour. You quickly see where you have overstepped the line.”

Saba has had her share of too-close encounters with the animal kingdom, including a snake bite after which friends had to keep her awake with electric shocks until help could arrive.

None, though, was closer than the day an elephant almost crushed her to death.

Saba, who has also done Big Cat Diaries and The Secret Life Of Elephants, was filming in Namibia, sleeping on a dried-up riverbed, when she was awoken by the massive beast moving past.

“With the moon and the mountains I thought it all looked so beautiful until he stopped and looked straight in my direction,” she recalls.

“He obviously knew the riverbed well and decided to investigate this strange thing he didn’t recognise.

“I frantically looked around for a place to run but there was no cover and the sand would have slowed me down. I knew if I tried to run he would have charged me, so I just had to lie there and pretend I was dead.

“I shrunk back into my sleeping bags and, lying on my back, looked up as he got within a metre and completely blocked out the moon.

“I thought I was finished, that he’d kneel on me and crush me. But instead he put out his trunk and smelled me from head to toe I could hear and feel his breath and calmly walked off.

“My heart was absolutely pounding and I was so frightened but also honoured. I was completely at his mercy but he had the grace to let me live.”

It’s a grace countless other elephants haven’t been shown in return.

Poaching responsible for what Saba calls the “elephant holocaust” in the 1980s was halted in its savage, bloody tracks by a ban on the international trade of ivory by the end of that decade.

Nearly 20 years of recovery followed until an experimental sale of stockpiled ivory to Japan and China sparked a poaching epidemic.

Between 2010 and 2012 Africa lost 100,000 elephants and any progress since then has been marginal.

“The poachers shift around the continent,” says Saba. “Here in Sumburu 25% of breeding females have been wiped out and what you have left is ragtag groups of orphaned youngsters.”

The sheer scale of the problem is hard to comprehend. But having seen it as a child and now again as an adult, Saba says it’s a horror that doesn’t gets any easier to handle.

Just one recent case, where she heard shots and raced, sadly too late, to try and help, is tragically typical.

“Every time you see a poached elephant there’s a whole terrible story of its struggle, its pain and its desperation to live. This one was about 25-years-old and had run for his life but was fatally wounded.

“As he felt his strength ebb from him he tried to throw himself up a tree, hooking his tusk over a branch to keep himself upright. But the wounds and his weight were too great. All you could see all the way down the tree was the bark stripped by his trunk as he fell.

“Each time one of these magnificent creatures is poached there’s a unique tale of its suffering.”

Saba’s life with the elephants is a mix of triumph and tragedy, joy and despair. She’s seen them swept away in rivers. And she tells of the agonies of watching the suffering of an elephant with untreatable colic, unable to intervene and just waiting for it to die before she could rescue its baby.

“Everything in your heart is saying you have to save it but you can’t make a decision until fate has taken its hand. You get deeply emotional.”

But there are happier moments, too, like the baby elephant who came right up to the side of a vehicle and scratched a perfect ear on it.

“We call him Leonardo, the elephant artist,” laughs Saba. “I put the picture up on Facebook and we had more than 20,000 hits in two days. It was really adorable.”

A Life With Elephants is at Eden Court, Inverness, on March 5 and The Lyceum, Edinburgh, on March 9.