Ionides - or "Iodine", as he came to be known throughout East Africa - has been called "the father of the Selous" by no less an authority then Brian Nicholson. A former British Army officer turned ivory hunter, he was briefly a white hunter working out of Arusha in the 1930, then joined the game department in southeastern Tanganyika in 1933. Although he continued his avid hunting, collecting rare species as far away as the Sudan and Abyssinia, Ionides was a precocious conservationist.