Jim membership

Since he was a child, conservationist Ian Douglas has been a fan of Jim Corbett - his novels, his life, his eventual message. His new book on the hunter-turned-wildlife protector offers fresh insight into the man, his kindness, his worries about our impact on ecosystems

- Gowri S

Ian Douglas was 10 when he first encountered Jim Corbett.

The 1948 classic The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag ‘struck me as slightly scary, but I liked it was a scary leopard,’ he says, chuckling.

Growing up in cold, coastal Northumberland in England, Corbett’s jungle adventures hardly seemed real. And yet they were! Thrilled, a young Douglas decided to go scouting in the woods near his home, in imitation of his hero.

‘I wasn’t going to find leopards or tigers, but I could track deer,’ he laughs. ‘I could trace where they had been feeding and find their droppings.’

Douglas, now 67, would go on to study environmental sciences, and has spent 40 years working in wetland conservation. ‘Most of the credit goes to Jim,’ he says.

By his late-20s, Douglas had begun following in the author’s actual footsteps too, revisiting trails on frequent visits to India and Nepal. Those side quests have now led to an adventure he hadn’t anticipated. Based on 40 years of research, Douglas has just published a book titled Undiscovered Corbett (Merlin Unwin UK), containing rare photographs of Jim Corbett, and letters and notes he left behind. Together with anecdotes and a wealth of biographical detail, they offer an unusually intimate view of the man behind the legend.

Yes, the hunter-turned-conservationist was the driving force behind India’s first national park (established in 1936 in Uttarakhand; first called the Hailey and renamed the Jim Corbett National Park two years after his death, in 1957).