Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Joy Adamson
Friederike Victoria "Joy" Adamson (née Gessner; 20 January 1910 – 3 January 1980) was a naturalist, artist and author. Her book, Born Free, describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. Born Free was printed in several languages and made into an Academy Award–winning movie of the same name. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.
Adamson was born to Victor and Traute Gessner (née Greipel) in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary (now Opava, Czech Republic), the second of three daughters. Her parents divorced when she was 10, and she went to live with her grandmother in Vienna. In her autobiography The Searching Spirit, Adamson wrote about her grandmother, saying, "It is to her I owe anything that may be good in me". [citation needed]
She grew up on an estate near Opava in the village called Kreuzberg (now Kružberk, Czech Republic). With the outbreak of the WWII she had moved to Vienna earning a music degree before studying sculpting and medicine. As a young adult, Adamson considered careers as a concert pianist, and in medicine.
Joy Adamson married three times in the span of ten years. Her first marriage in 1935 was to Viktor von Klarwill.
She went to Kenya in 1937 where she met and married in 1938 the botanist Peter Bally, who gave her the nickname "Joy". Peter did botanical paintings, and it was he who encouraged her to continue sketching and painting the flora and fauna in her surroundings. She met her third husband, senior wildlife warden George Adamson, while on safari in the early 1940s and married him in 1944. They made their home together in Kenya.
Joy Adamson is best known for her conservation efforts associated with Elsa the Lioness. In 1956, George Adamson, in the course of his job as game warden of the Northern Frontier District in Kenya, shot and killed a lioness as she charged him and another warden. George later realized the lioness was just protecting her cubs, which were found nearby in a rocky crevice. Taking them home, Joy and George found it difficult to care for all the cubs' needs. The two largest cubs, named "Big One" and "Lustica", were passed on to be cared for by a zoo in Rotterdam, and the smallest, "Elsa", was raised by the couple.[citation needed]
After some time living together, the Adamsons decided to set Elsa free rather than send her to a zoo, and spent many months training her to hunt and survive on her own. Elsa became the first lioness successfully released back into the wild, the first to have contact after release, and the first to have a litter of cubs. The Adamsons kept their distance from the cubs, getting close enough only to photograph them.[citation needed]
In January 1961, Elsa died from babesiosis, a disease resulting from a tick bite. Her three young cubs became a nuisance, killing the livestock of local farmers. The Adamsons, who feared the farmers might kill the cubs, were able to eventually capture them and transport them to neighboring Tanganyika Territory, where they were promised a home at Serengeti National Park.
Hub AI
Joy Adamson AI simulator
(@Joy Adamson_simulator)
Joy Adamson
Friederike Victoria "Joy" Adamson (née Gessner; 20 January 1910 – 3 January 1980) was a naturalist, artist and author. Her book, Born Free, describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. Born Free was printed in several languages and made into an Academy Award–winning movie of the same name. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.
Adamson was born to Victor and Traute Gessner (née Greipel) in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary (now Opava, Czech Republic), the second of three daughters. Her parents divorced when she was 10, and she went to live with her grandmother in Vienna. In her autobiography The Searching Spirit, Adamson wrote about her grandmother, saying, "It is to her I owe anything that may be good in me". [citation needed]
She grew up on an estate near Opava in the village called Kreuzberg (now Kružberk, Czech Republic). With the outbreak of the WWII she had moved to Vienna earning a music degree before studying sculpting and medicine. As a young adult, Adamson considered careers as a concert pianist, and in medicine.
Joy Adamson married three times in the span of ten years. Her first marriage in 1935 was to Viktor von Klarwill.
She went to Kenya in 1937 where she met and married in 1938 the botanist Peter Bally, who gave her the nickname "Joy". Peter did botanical paintings, and it was he who encouraged her to continue sketching and painting the flora and fauna in her surroundings. She met her third husband, senior wildlife warden George Adamson, while on safari in the early 1940s and married him in 1944. They made their home together in Kenya.
Joy Adamson is best known for her conservation efforts associated with Elsa the Lioness. In 1956, George Adamson, in the course of his job as game warden of the Northern Frontier District in Kenya, shot and killed a lioness as she charged him and another warden. George later realized the lioness was just protecting her cubs, which were found nearby in a rocky crevice. Taking them home, Joy and George found it difficult to care for all the cubs' needs. The two largest cubs, named "Big One" and "Lustica", were passed on to be cared for by a zoo in Rotterdam, and the smallest, "Elsa", was raised by the couple.[citation needed]
After some time living together, the Adamsons decided to set Elsa free rather than send her to a zoo, and spent many months training her to hunt and survive on her own. Elsa became the first lioness successfully released back into the wild, the first to have contact after release, and the first to have a litter of cubs. The Adamsons kept their distance from the cubs, getting close enough only to photograph them.[citation needed]
In January 1961, Elsa died from babesiosis, a disease resulting from a tick bite. Her three young cubs became a nuisance, killing the livestock of local farmers. The Adamsons, who feared the farmers might kill the cubs, were able to eventually capture them and transport them to neighboring Tanganyika Territory, where they were promised a home at Serengeti National Park.