Aidan Hartley

Aidan Hartley

Aidan Hartley is the Spectator's Wild Life columnist.

Years of living dangerously

The son of a fish-paste factory manager in London’s East End, Alan Root fell in love with ornithology as a Blitz evacuee when he first clapped eyes on the pea-sized egg of a goldcrest, England’s smallest bird. After the war his father got a job manufacturing bully-beef in Kenya, where Root discovered a much richer

Cooking for freedom

A few days before I met Ahmed Jama in Mogadishu, three Islamist gunmen from Al Shabaab — al-Qa’eda’s Somali branch — burst into his new restaurant wearing suicide bomb jackets. They sprayed the place with bullets and then detonated themselves. One bomber set himself off in the dining room itself, killing 20 of Ahmed’s customers.

Wild life | 15 November 2012

Northern Kenya If I go out in darkness I dread neither the leopard nor the lion but I recoil from the aardvark: for me a terrifying creature. The ant bear, or earth pig, is a living fossil with snout of pig, a serpent’s tongue, ears of a rabbit and a kangaroo’s tail. A sangoma’s charm

Wild life | 18 October 2012

Mogadishu I return to Mogadishu to find it’s calm – only a few assassinations, hit-and-run attacks, IEDs or suicide bombs — and at last most Somalis seem ready for peace. I’ve covered events here for 21 years and love imagining an end to war in this delightful city. I also know that it’s during times

Wild life | 19 September 2012

He was under a tiny patch of shade under a tree in one of the earth’s remotest spots. At Nadapal, the Kenya–South Sudan border, you might expect to meet the ghost of Chatwin, but not a dead ringer for Peter Sellers dying of thirst. ‘You English? Ach great,’ he croaked as he loaded his Samsonite

Wild life | 25 August 2012

Kigali Eighteen years after Rwanda’s bloodbath I disembarked from my flight and was surprised to see that mortar craters no longer pitted the airport tarmac. At a city café where I recall Hutu militias swigging lager next to a pile of severed hands, I saw a pretty blonde in a short dress, shades, red lipstick,

Wild life | 28 July 2012

Kenya coast A loud crash woke us in the middle of our first night at the beach house. ‘Robbers must be trying to break in,’ said Claire, kneeing me in the back. ‘Go and see.’ I was groggy. It had been a 12-hour drive from the Rift Valley to the coast, with several near collisions

Wild life

Laikipia My new pride and joy is a pedigree Boran bull named Woragus 317. We know him as Ollie. Sired by the famous 956 Segera from the legendary Gianni line, he was bred on Mark and Nicky Myatt-Taylor’s stud in Tanzania’s distant southern highlands. I recklessly bought him on the strength of a photograph, bidding

Wild life | 26 May 2012

Juba After an all-night rainstorm in Juba I woke to see the mosquito that bit me in the dark. Now, several days later, a fever returns to me like an old friend met on the road in Africa. Malaria. I can detect the signs without even having a blood test — the suicidal depression, the

Wild life | 28 April 2012

Laikipia, Kenya Darkness was closing in and one of the sheep was lost. A search party formed. On my Kenya farm big cats, African wild dogs and hyenas abound. Livestock left out overnight are almost sure to be devoured by morning. I’ve had a blind cow grazing in the safety of the garden croquet lawn

Wild life | 31 March 2012

I looked at the bomb craters and their shrapnel blast patterns. Dozens of metres away, rocks and tree trunks were spattered and split from daisy level upwards. I gulped. ‘Say we hear a Sukhoi jet. How many seconds do we have?’ ‘Little time,’ said our rebel guide. ‘Maybe you see them before you hear them.’

Wild life | 25 February 2012

Kenya   At Nairobi’s Muthaiga Club this week I bumped into Stanley Johnson, author of the superb memoir Stanley, I Presume and father of Britain’s future prime minister. Mr Johnson and I have an English education in common. Apart from Oxford and Sherborne, we attended the prep school Ravenswood, on the edge of Exmoor. ‘On

Wild life | 28 January 2012

Wau, South Sudan ‘Let’s visit the brewery,’ said Ken when we reached Wau. We were dusty and parched. It was searing hot. Like a character in Ice Cold in Alex, I saw before me a mirage of the cap popping off a chilled bottle. ‘Yes,’ I croaked. We had driven thousands of kilometres across South

Wild life | 3 December 2011

Kenya In protest against the lack of law and order in my farming district I have decided to dye my white cows pink. I don’t know what to do about my red cattle, but I was inspired by the news story of the Dartmoor sheep man who dipped his flocks in bright orange to deter

Wild life | 5 November 2011

Kenya I am proud of Kenya for taking on Muslim extremists in southern Somalia. Rather wisely, the Kenyan military has so far prevented hacks from reaching the field. But for anybody in the outside world who cares, this is not a new battle. Operations against Somalis of varying types of fanaticism have been mounted since

Wild life | 8 October 2011

Aidan Hartley’s Wild Life Israel Jerusalem was once a very sad place for me and I feared returning. I was mad with grief when I was last here in the 1990s. I remember my friend Julian tried to cheer me up by taking me to a gun shop where a South African who had made

Wild Life | 10 September 2011

Aidan Hartley’s Wild Life  Nairobi My friend Philip Coulson was shot at midnight while driving home after the theatre in Nairobi recently. He had slowed down to go over some rumble strips when a white car halted in front of him. ‘A man got out and I could see in silhouette that he had a

Wild life | 13 August 2011

Indian Ocean On Hassan’s dhow, shaped like Vasco da Gama’s caravel, I can forget about dry land for a fortnight of holiday. If I could, I’d give it all up and set sail for the outer islands — to Aldabra, to the Chagos, to Socotra. And then I realise I am beached without my old

Drought didn’t cause Somalia’s famine

War did. And food aid may well make it worse It seems wicked to question charity appeals for starving people in the Horn of Africa. Hunger is a terrible way to go, as I discovered when I once asked a dying Somali near Mogadishu to tell me what he was feeling. He was just passing

Wild life | 2 July 2011

‘So much sorting to do,’ said my Aunt Beryl. We stood in the middle of her home in Sussex. I hadn’t visited for many years, not since Granny and Grandpa lived here. The memories of those dear people came in such a rush of images I had to sit down. That’s when I noticed the