Among The Elephants - Ian & Oria Douglas-Hamilton

In 1965 Iain Douglas-Hamilton eagerly accepted the challenge to to solve the problem of four hundred and fifty African Elephants confined in the small Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania. For five years he lived among the elephants in a camp in the woodlands famed for their tree-climbing lions some of them man-eaters. Day by day he taught himself to recognise the individual elephants and made the first systematic study of their behaviour in the wild. With other scientists he pioneered the radio tracking of their movements, and recorded every minute of their daily lives. He watched the young bring up the babies and the old rush to the help of the stricke and dying. The great matriarch Bodice the four terifying Torone sisters and the gentle Virgo become as distinctive personalities to the reader as they did to him. In return the elephants threatened or ignored him; three times they transfixed his Land-rover with their tusks ; and in the end Virgo came to accept him and introduced her calf to him while remaining truly wild.