Renowned elephant conservationist and wildlife television presenter Saba Douglas-Hamilton – known to millions for This Wild Life and Big Cat Diaries series – is coming to Yeovil next week. The New Blackmore Vale caught up with her as she prepared for the show

Q. What kind of childhood did you have?
A. I grew up in East Africa, living in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. My father had spent part of his boyhood in Africa and always wanted to return there – he’s a zoologist, and when I was a child, he was researching elephants in Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania. He did the first-ever study of the social behaviour of wild African elephants, and made the big discovery that elephant herds are led by matriarchs and not by bulls, as had previously been thought.

Q. Is this why you love elephants?
A. My father’s work means I’ve always felt intimately connected to elephants, and to their fate. Because they were never anonymous creatures for me – all the ones I’ve ever known had names. I’m thinking for example of Boadicea, a ferocious matriarch who would come at us, thrashing her way through the bushes. She’d meet us in this swirl of dust, and we were left cowering in the footwell of the car as my father turned the engine off and we just sat there.

Q. Where did you go to school?
A. My sister and I went to boarding school in Nairobi, but during the holidays we’d return to Uganda, where our parents were living at the time, and it was basically a war zone. Idi Amin had just been deposed, and it was a very turbulent time: there were soldiers roaming around, a 6pm curfew, and we could hear gunfire across the Nile. People were starving, and every building was pock-marked with bullet holes. We lived in a tiny house beside the river. It had no doors or windows, and we had to barricade ourselves in at night to stop the hyenas getting in.

Q. How did you get into the work you do now, as a conservationist and a conservation filmmaker?
A. When I was in my late 20s, a great friend of mine was shot in a violent robbery in Kenya. That triggered something in me – I realised I could be dead tomorrow, that I had to push myself to my limits and find out who I was. I spent a lot of time in the bush working with Save The Elephants and then someone from the BBC reached out to me and asked if she could see what I was like on camera, and that led to my work as a television presenter.
I enjoy telling stories, so this brought together everything I most cared about. And I love the teamwork – you have to work very closely with the other people in the team and there’s a wonderful synergy, a great sense of purpose.

Q. What’s been your biggest moment as a wildlife filmmaker?
A. A few years ago I was working on a BBC shoot in the Namibian desert, and decided to sleep on a mattress on a dry riverbed, under the stars. The film crew weren’t so keen, so they stayed in tents. During the night I could hear elephants in the distance and that didn’t faze me at all, I thought, how beautiful – but then suddenly I woke up, 100 per cent alert, and saw a huge bull elephant walking towards me. There were no trees to climb to get away from him, and the sand was too heavy to run in. I realised my only option was to lie still, and to play dead.
I remember rolling over onto my back, watching him come towards me with my heart pounding, thinking: ‘this is the end, he’s going to crush me under his knees and there’s nothing I can do’. He came right up to me, and his massive frame blocked out the moon…and then he stopped. He reached out his trunk and he smelled every bit of me, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. And then he stood there, processing the information – human, female, sleeping. And then he turned, and very slowly he walked away.

Q. What’s next for your work with elephants?
A. Right now we’re in a moment of success with elephant conservation, because a global coalition has defeated the ivory trade – at least for now – and the elephant populations are increasing. The big issue though is co-existence – because the human population is growing as well, and we leave a heavy footprint, especially across Africa. We must make sure we leapfrog the kind of mistakes that have been made elsewhere in the world – we must do better than was done before, by previous generations. We have to create long-term sustainability and making that happen is very much my mission.

Saba Douglas-Hamilton is at the Westlands entertainment venue in Yeovil on Tuesday 20 September.