The camp was calm. Then the river began to roar

When Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, ejected from the aeroplane he was flying solo to Scotland, he parachuted to the ground and, injured, was taken to the local police station. This was 1941 and he had come on a doomed mission to draw the United Kingdom into peace negotiations. Hess’s aim was to deliver his proposals to the 14th Duke of Hamilton, another keen aviator and the first man to fly over Mount Everest, whom he fancifully supposed might be sympathetic. Douglas Douglas-Hamilton met him, then flew straight to England to report to Churchill.

When Iain Douglas-Hamilton flew into the Samburu national reserve in northern Kenya at the beginning of this month, he landed his plane on the gravel without incident and, carrying no secret plans for peace negotiations, made his way without incident to the Elephant Watch camp his family have built by the banks of the river Ewaso Nyiro.

The 14th Duke was Iain’s uncle — Iain (now 75) having been born the year after Hess crashed into Scotland. As enthusiastic an aviator as both his father and his uncle, he says it’s years since he has driven anywhere in Kenya. On the afternoon in question, he and his wife Oria had flown back to Elephant Watch after a grand luncheon gathering of what remains of white Kenyan society, near Lake Naivasha, hundreds of miles away.

But Iain is no high-society gadfly. If any one man can be called personally responsible for the gathering of knowledge and the raising of international awareness of the plight of the elephant, it is he. Over half a century he has pioneered and advanced the techniques of tracking and recording the movements and migrations of these noble beasts across sub-Saharan Africa, giving us a digital abundance of the data we need if we are to understand what Douglas–Hamilton calls ‘elephant choices’.