In January 1961, Elsa died from babesiosis, a disease resulting from a tick bite. The Adamsons kept their distance from the cubs, getting close enough only to photograph them. They were in the end successful, and Elsa became the first lioness successfully released back into the wild, the first to have contact after release, and the first known released lion to have a litter of cubs. 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.Īfter 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. Taking them home, Joy and George found it difficult to care for all the cubs' needs. George later realized the lioness was just protecting her cubs, which were found nearby in a rocky crevice. 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.

Joy Adamson is best known for her conservation efforts associated with Elsa the Lioness. She met her third husband, senior wildlife warden George Adamson, while on safari in the early 1940s and married him in 1944. Peter did botanical paintings, and it was he who encouraged her to continue sketching and painting the flora and fauna in her surroundings. She went to Kenya in 1937 where she met and married in 1938 the botanist Peter Bally, who gave her the nickname 'Joy'. Her first marriage in 1935 was to Viktor von Klarwill (aka Ziebel 1902–1985). Joy Adamson married three times in the span of ten years. As a young adult, Adamson considered careers as a concert pianist, and in medicine. She grew up on an estate near Vienna, was educated in Vienna earning a music degree before studying sculpting and medicine. 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'.

Her parents divorced when she was 10, and she went to live with her grandmother. BiographyĪdamson was born to Victor and Traute Gessner in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary (now Opava, Czech Republic), the second of three daughters. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art. Born Free was printed in several languages, and made into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. Her book, Born Free, describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. Friederike Victoria 'Joy' Adamson née Gessner, (20 January 1910 – 3 January 1980) was a naturalist, artist and author.

The spotted sphinx joy adamson