Delta Willis

Naturalist Photographer
Production Partner with Alan Root of Award-winning Wildlife Documentaries
Friend of All Creatures Great & Small
15 January, 2006 —-One of the world’s most astute naturalists, Joan Root, was shot at her home on the shores of Kenya’s Lake Naivasha shortly after midnight Friday morning as she called for help via a phone in her bedroom. This was not the first attack on Ms. Root, whose newly installed metal doors deterred intruders. Bullets from an AK47 were fired through the bedroom window pane. Neighbors from around the lake, once famous for attracting the Happy Valley Set and now an environmental quagmire, rushed to the scene, many of them arriving by plane. Friends from Nanyuki brought dogs that tracked scents from the scene; two suspects were arrested. Early reports that this may have been a robbery attempt were not substantiated, as nothing seems to have been taken.

If the killing of the 69 year-old naturalist is an assassination, as some suggest, in retaliation for her leadership of a local an anti-poaching Task Force, Joan Root joins a growing list of white conservationists murdered or maimed by poachers or people who profit from poaching. Not far down the Naivasha Lake Road from the Root house is Elsamere, once home to George & Joy Adamson. In 1989, George Adamson’s Land Rover was riddled by poacher’s bullets as he and two assistants were killed near his lion sanctuary at Kora, a remote area favored by poachers. Like Dian Fossey, murdered after she taunted gorilla poachers with voodoo, the more demure Joan Root was attacked alone at night. Coincidentally, Alan Root was the one to introduce Fossey to the gorillas she would study; he also captured the silverback charge sequence for Gorillas in the Mist.

Wildlife documentaries produced by Alan & Joan Root often rivaled feature films and in some cases surpassed them, although the actors were animals and birds that did not always stick with the script. This is where Joan’s skills were essential. As Wilbur E. Garrett, former editor at National Geographic (which published several articles and photographs by the Roots;) said in 1980, “It’s not like sending a film crew to Africa. Their films are an extension of their lives. Somehow, you think the animals can understand them.”

“She was a superb field naturalist,” wrote Iain Douglas-Hamilton, known for his pivotal studies of elephants and the Save the Elephants initiative in Samburu. “I remember so well one morning at the camp when Joan purely from the alarm cries of birds was able to locate a huge green mamba hidden in the trees above our huts.” Iain and his wife, Oria Douglas-Hamilton, were among Naivasha neighbors who flew to the scene early Friday morning.

The setting for Joan Root’s home was originally chosen as a home site by Ewart Grogan, who considered this landscape the most beautiful he encountered in his legendary 1898 walk from the Cape to Cairo. The 88 acre nature preserve is home to 200 species of birds, including African fish eagles that use yellow-barked acacias near the lake shore as their perch. The lawn was once home to many wild orphans that Joan tended and fed, including an aardvark, a hippo, a black and white colobus monkey, and an African porcupine which she cajoled to shake its quills for visitors. Snakes and tortoises were part of the bestiary, and Joan once slept with a caracal, to acclimatize the cat to humans so it would be easier to capture on film. Her affinity for animals, and her ability to successfully rear a young orphaned elephant, appealed to Alan Root, who she married in 1961.

“Alan had noticed her on several occasions but had never been able to cut through her shyness until one day he heard she was bringing up a small orphaned elephant, ”John Heminway wrote in his book, No Man’s Land. “Elephants under six months are usually impossible to raise. Joan had been more successful than most people, and Alan, in his own words, ‘liked winners.’

“A master of the deadly pun, Alan recalls: ‘Before we were married, she wore a monocle and so did I. Together we made quite a spectacle.’ On the first night of their honeymoon, Joan was stung by a scorpion. They were camped next to the Tsavo River Bridge, where in 1898, the rail-laying crew had been terrorized by two man-eating lions. The Roots sat up until dawn, he comforting her, both listening to the howl of the passing trains and to a lion, perhaps a descendant of the man-eaters, roaring nearby. It was the beginning of an accident-prone but very happy partnership. “I don’t know what I’d do without Joan,” Alan told Heminway; “I’d probably have to marry three women at the same time.”

The daughter of a coffee farmer, Joan Thorpe was born in Nairobi. At 16 she left Kenya for school in Switzerland, but her love for African wildlife drew her back to East Africa. Although she attended the same high school as Alan Root, they didn’t meet until 1960, in Tanzania, where Joan was helping her father run a photo safari. Alan was working on a film with Dr. Bernard Grzimek. “Serengeti Shall Not Die” eventually won an Oscar for best documentary. The film features the Ngorongoro Crater that lies southeast of the Serengeti National Park, which became a second home to the Roots, who commuted to their Naivasha home via a single engine Cessna. Both were qualified pilots, and while Joan focused more on still photography, her ability to organize safaris and insights on wildlife behavior were invaluable contributions to the films.

One of their first projects together was out of Africa, in the Galapagos. Alan so disliked the production qualities of “Enchanted Isles,” narrated by HRH Prince Philip, that he demanded control of all future films: editing, choosing narrators and music, plus writing the scripts for the genre of blue chip documentaries that the Roots largely pioneered. People are absent; Nature is center stage. “Secrets of the African Baobab,” featured innovative scenes filmed inside a hornbill’s nest as part of an enchanting story about these distinctive, big-trunk trees which legend holds were planted up-side-down. The interior sequences were considered cinematic breakthroughs in 1976, and required a patience filmmakers are no longer allowed. Two years passed before hornbills returned to the nest where the Roots had placed a pane of glass. For another film, they spent 30 nights waiting for alates to hatch from a 15 foot tall termite mound. The beautiful moonlit sequence featured in “Mysterious Castles of Clay,” narrated by Orson Welles, and nominated for an Oscar. The Roots were the first to capture the epic proportions of the annual migration in “The Year of the Wildebeest;” the perilous river crossing with gnus being caught by crocodiles has since become standard fare in derivative docs. What no one else has imitated so well is the using the gondola of a hot air balloon as a camera platform to capture the immense scale of the great migration. Joan served as aeronaut while Alan filmed, a skill that she employed again for “Balloon Safari,” which climaxed with the hot air ascent over Africa’s tallest mountain, Kilimanjaro, in 1975.

John Heminway described their ascent: Alan Root coined an expression, “The Root Effect,” to describe the illusion of the sides of the basket lowering, the higher the balloon climbs. At five thousand feet the basket’s walls are at waist level, but at twenty thousand feet they seem little higher than one’s ankles. Now as the balloon drifted over the top of Mawenzi Joan was behaving strangely. For a second Alan considered “The Root Effect.” She was uncharacteristically snappy and clumsy. “What’s the matter?” Alan asked. “Nothing,” she shouted back. Suddenly he noticed the tube from her oxygen supply had gotten fouled. As fast as he could he reconnected it and soon she was her placid self.

Once on the Tanzania side of the 19,340 foot high craters, the Roots were arrested by local officials as “spies.”

Modestly describing herself as Alan’s assistant, Joan served as a target for a spitting cobra he needed to film, and narrowly escaped being blinded by an enraged hippo that ripped off her diving mask with its tusks. The resulting underwater film on Mzima Springs inspired a recent sequel by Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble, who continue to follow in the Roots footsteps with their new HD documentary about a tree, the African fig, in “Queen of Trees.”

After two decades of being partners, the Roots divorced in 1981. “We were together too much –never out of each others sight and sound,” Alan told a reporter for the London Times. “Plus I was totally self-centered and never thought about the relationship.”
Distraught when her marriage fell apart, Joan sought the advice of Dr. Mary Leakey, who offered to divulge an ultimatum she gave Louis Leakey under similar conditions, if only Joan would keep the advice totally confidential. This conversation took place as the three of us were having Sundowners at a private home in Langata, a suburb of Nairobi where I liked to invite people to dinner. I took Mary’s cue and slipped away to tend my charcoal fire, and Joan, true to her promise, would never tell me Dr. Leakey’s secret.

In 1985, when she no longer worked with Alan Root on his films, Iain Douglas Hamilton found Joan’s skills perfectly suited his work. “It was essential to have a really good aerial observer who could spot and count. Joan was very sharp-eyed quality controller, and had taken part in numerous aerial counts in Kenya,” Dr. Douglas-Hamilton wrote. “We flew the first leg all the way across to Garamba in my Cessna 185, then on next day to Bangui. This second leg was interesting, because we flew low at about 400 feet across the continent counting any elephants we saw on the way. In Bangui we met up with a young Belgian scientist, Jean Marc Froment and his wife, who both became great friends of Joanne as they called her. We then pushed up North and made censuses in Bamingi-Bangoran and Manovo-Gounda and were able to describe the tragedy that had taken place there. The rhinos were totally gone and the elephants down by 85-95%. This was the first time hard scientific data was collected to quantify the catastrophic trend for the rhinos, to extinction, and of the elephants to small numbers, in Central Africa. Our small team in Northern CAR was joined by Oria towards the end of the count and then we all three flew low level back across Africa, once more counting elephants all the way back to Uganda. Our low level flights told us that the collapse of elephant populations was not restricted to CAR, but included the whole of that vast area that ten years before had been swarming with elephants.

“Without Joan it would have been quite impossible to train Central African observers in time for us to execute the count. She was so sharp at spotting and recognizing species from the air, and then making an accurate count as the plane rushed by. In her quiet and professional way, she demonstrated the quality control essential for that historic count to have meaning….

“After that epic survey, Joan became very involved with the counts in Tsavo National Park. In the late 80s the elephant population was still under enormous pressure and the first elephant count in ten years was conducted in 1988, with a large number of volunteers working with the wildlife department and a mix of pilots and observers from the government and private sectors. Joan was once again a key qualified observer, and she took part in many subsequent counts, seeing how the tide was turned for the elephants as the numbers rose back up from the 6000-odd we had counted at their nadir.

“She was a really good friend that one felt was always there and if one needed someone who would do the right thing by animals and the environment, she would never let anyone down,” Douglas-Hamilton concluded. “She ought to be recognized as someone quietly heroic in her own way.”

Joan Root’s recent conservation projects included supporting scientists and volunteers from the Earthwatch Institute who are monitoring environmental conditions at Lake Naivasha, in addition to her leadership of the Task Force in the area. Her ashes will be scattered at the Naivasha estate that was home to so many of the wild animals and birds that she loved.

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1. Wilbur E. Garrett quoted in PEOPLE Magazine story by Delta Willis, “The Other Roots (Alan and Joan) Document Africa’s Wildlife,” 1981
2. Dr. Iain Douglas Hamilton, personal communication, January 14, 2006 www.savetheelephants.com
3. No Man’s Land by John Heminway, published in 1983
4. Alan Root quoted by Mary Riddell, “The Man Who Has Given His Life to Love and Africa,” The Times Wednesday, July 17,1996
5. Earthwatch Institute “Lakes of the Rift Valley” project www.earthwatch.org