During my time in Colonial Africa in the 1950s I was fortunate enough to meet up with a New Zealander who was one of the world’s most reticent and retiring environmentalists — and the only human I have ever known to be living so close to Nature’s various hidden secrets and mysteries.

This man of many philosophies regarding how all things great and small exist with us on our planet was Ronald de la Bere Barker, a hunter-turned-hermit distantly related to the Queen Mother’s Bowes-Lyons family.

His simple home was near the great Clarence lookalike Rufiji River in Tanganyika, a name also bestowed on Ronald for his close connection with this waterway’s fauna, flora and everything that moved on its shores. Ronald devoted his life to studying, for instance, how ants run their many underground empires, supposedly better than we do, and how plants and trees live together in peace, assisting each other to grow and survive the rigours of eternal change.

My acquaintance with Rufiji first started when I was having a quiet drink in the old historic German Colonial Kaiserhof Hotel in Dar es Salaam city. My new contact told me how he had travelled to Australia from his home in New Zealand and then later to Africa in search of adventure and to work as a professional hunter, much as he had done when living in Australasia.

I was, however, soon assured with considerable vigour that he had quickly replaced his guns with a strong magnifying glass and the patience of a Biblical Job to study and understand, over decades, how Nature really worked beyond our human senses.

My new friend told me how he made monthly visits by bus and foot to Tanganyika’s biggest city to collect a few paltry shillings for a column he provided on his studies to the local Tanganyika Standard newspaper. As he was basically self-sufficient at his bush hermitage, this before-his-time science-loving Hippy would collect his puny stipend from the editor, Mr. Oswald Blake, and then set himself up in the Kaiserhof bar, happily drinking his money away while enjoying good cheer with the locals, just as he did with me at our first meeting.

So well-known had he become by all concerned, including the hotel management, that he was allowed to sleep in the bar on the nights of each of his visits before setting off the next morning without as much as a headache to return to his river settlement, a day’s journey away.

Rufiji kindly invited me to visit his jungle kingdom. When I arrived there by car after traversing numerous rough bush tracks and having survived several encounters with passing antelope and giraffes, I found a stockade of sorts surrounding several native huts. One of these, I soon discovered, was Rufiji’s private library with just about every classical book in the English language on its many shelves.

It was not long, however, before I discovered that Rufiji was no ignorant bushwhacker but rather a highly cultured and educated man who had earlier written a couple of well published books on his close and amazing observations of life in the raw in the middle of Africa.

Rufiji’s simple home and makeshift nature laboratory was adjacent to the Rufiji River Delta which, during the First World War, was the isolated scene of one of the war’s most drawn-out sea battles involving British battleships which had forced Germany’s notorious and highly armed naval cruiser, the Koningsberg, to take shelter up the river before being sunk after many days of big gun exchanges.

An immensely strong and imperious man, Rufiji had the heart of a dove and was easily upset when even the smallest of insects was killed by a pair of careless feet. When I once pointed out to him that he usually blew the proceeds of his monthly newspaper cheques in a matter of hours, his almost innocent reply was “Oh, have I? Who needs money anyway? I’ve got everything I need from the African bush and river…….”

Rufiji was probably the most happy foreigner in Africa at the time. He had managed to find adventure, shelter and personal satisfaction without the encumbrances of the usual suburban mortgage, a city job or the sheer frustration of living in the modern world.

I was naturally intrigued how this New Zealander, so far away from the comforts of his Pacific family home, had created an intimate life with the insects and plants around his new-found settlement miles from any non-African eyes. In answer to my various questions, Rufiji would point to the fact, for example, that ants had what he believed to be a perfect system of living. He taught me how all the creepy-crawlies of Africa had identical communal living systems to the ants and other insects in Australia — but nowhere else.

From his close observations over many years, he believed that, when they were old, senior worker ants would be pensioned off with lighter than normal duties in their colony. Like us, they are agriculturists intent on farming fungi and domesticating aphids, as we do livestock, and which they milk for the nourishment of baby ants held in underground creches.

My teacher of all things natural would point out that all ants practice climate control with their own-style air conditioning system running though their nests; how they were ardent miners knowing exactly just how and when to prop up their workings in dry weather and creating levees well before floods arrive.

From various experiments, Rufiji found that ants have an intricate division of labour, with the queen being capable of laying thousands of eggs from a one-night honeymoon with her drone lover. This specially selected drone ant would apparently be chosen from a bunch of males representing the ant nest’s ‘middle class’ and was allowed special privileges such as lounging around between royal love affairs.

By comparison, the vast number of neutered worker ants are responsible for tunnel construction, food foraging, milking and defending the nest. They are also the ones carrying important commands from the queen by communicating with each other while walking in line and brushing their antennae’s together with sounds and exchanges of message-carrying chemicals.

Rufiji continually reminded me that science has estimated that the world’s total population of ants is about five million billion and that they have been around for the past 100 million years, defying our earth’s great meteor strike some 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all living species were wiped out.

His intensive scientific investigations into plants taught him that most living green matter is also capable of communicating with its own species by sending essential sugars and chemical signals through their roots into a vast underground network of fungi connecting all plants and trees — and causing them to respond in similar vein. Certain species of plants, I was told, also “conversed” with each other by means of electrochemical signals, warning of dangers and creating extrasensory perceptions.

My jungle hermit of the Rufiji River Delta also proved to his satisfaction that plants have feelings and a sense of consciousness very similar to that of his beloved ants. His long and patient field experiments also provided evidence that plants are conscious as to when their nectar is being stolen and they can close up their flower petals if the thieving insect’s arrival is not suitable to their time of growth.

In likewise fashion, acacia bushes and trees in Africa spray protective scents when marauding elephants come to denude them of their leaves. Other plant varieties in both Africa and Australia cannibalise invading insets while others have their own supply of herbicides to warn predators from nibbling their stem, fruits and roots.

For my friend Rufiji, his ants and plants proved to him that their behaviours are possibly in some ways equal to that of we humans and are possibly even superior as they live amicably in their own societies without violence from their own kind and generally experience good health and longevity. As he told me at the beginning of our association, the “natural bush has everything” and ants and plants are far from being biological robots as we so often regard them to be.