Conservationist who devoted his life to the study and preservation of the African elephant

The British scientist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who has died aged 83, became the world’s leading authority on the behaviour of African elephants and played a vital part in ensuring their conservation.

His efforts to save the African elephant began in 1965 when, as an Oxford zoology graduate who had also just received his pilot’s licence, he flew his Piper Pacer bush plane from Nairobi down to Tanzania’s pocket-sized Lake Manyara national park. The challenge he had accepted at the age of 23 was how to solve the problem of 450 elephants confined in a space too small to support them.