Iain Grahame - confidant of President Idi Amin and expert on Ugandan birds, pheasants of all species and butterflies

Iain Grahame (left) penned a fascinating account of his times with Idi Amin 

THE death, aged 91, has occurred of Iain Grahame, ornithologist and world authority on the pheasant family.

A lifelong naturalist, Major Grahame was also an expert on the birds of Uganda with which he became acquainted while serving with a battalion of the King’s African Rifles in the 1950s.

He was commanding officer of Idi Amin, later to become ruthless president of the country.

The two men maintained contact, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office would sometimes  dispatch Grahame to Kampala in the hope that he could use his influence to deflect Amin from some of his more eccentric actions.

It was he who secured the release of British lecturer Denis Hills, who, while in Uganda, had been sentenced to death by firing squad, after referring to the president in the draft of an unpublished book as a 'village tyrant'.

Grahame is said to have achieved the reprieve partly  by the offer of a pair to of white peacocks - regarded by Amin as prestigious -  that he had bred in an aviary at his home on the Suffolk-Essex border.

Grahame, who lost his mother to a German bomb when he was aged just 11, had an adventurous life which included playing polo, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and discovering new species of butterfly, of which one, Charaxes grahamei, was named after him.

His father, Lewis Gretton Grahame-Wigan, was an Olympic equestrian rider, painter and London-based police constable who had been discharged as an officer from the 13th/18th Hussars during the 1914-18 war for failing to conform to Army discipline when he refused, perhaps through claustrophobia, to enter a tank.

Instead, he had insisted into going into battle armed only with a bow and arrow with which he transfixed the first German he saw.

In the 1970s, Grahame was successful in breeding in confinement a pair of an endangered species, the Himalayan blood pheasant, which he managed to bring back to England after two dangerous trips to the slopes of Everest and Kanchenjunga in Nepal.

In 1975, he and his second wife, Didy, co-founded the World Pheasant Association, a research organisation which thrives to this day.

His third wife, Carolyn 'Bunny' Campione, who survives him, has been a regular presenter  on BBC-TV's  Antiques Roadshow since 1985.