Jim Corbett (hunter) - Retiring in Kenya

Retiring in Kenya

After 1947, Corbett and his sister Maggie retired to Nyeri, Kenya, where he continued to write and sound the alarm about declining numbers of jungle cats and other wildlife. Jim Corbett was at the Tree Tops, a hut built on the branches of a giant ficus tree, when Princess Elizabeth stayed there on 5–6 February 1952, at the time of the death of her father, King George VI. Corbett wrote in the hotel's visitors' register:

For the first time in the history of the world, a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess, and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience, she climbed down from the tree the next day a Queen—God bless her.

Jim Corbett died of a heart attack a few days after he finished writing his sixth book Tree Tops, and was buried at St. Peter's Anglican Church in Nyeri. His memories were kept intact in the form of the Chaupal called meeting place, Moti House, which Corbett had built for his friend Moti Singh, and the Corbett Wall, a long wall (approximately 4.5 miles (7.2 km)) built around the village to protect crops from wild animals.

Jim Corbett's first book, Man-eaters of Kumaon, was a great success in India, the United Kingdom and the United States; the first edition of the American Book-of-the-Month Club being 250,000 copies. It was later translated into 27 languages. His fourth book, Jungle Lore, is considered his autobiography.

The Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand, India was renamed in his honour in 1957. He had played a key role in establishing this protected area in the 1930s.

In 1968, one of the five remaining subspecies of tigers was named after him: Panthera tigris corbetti, the Indochinese Tiger, also called Corbett's tiger.

In 1994 and 2002, the long-neglected graves of Corbett and his sister (both in Kenya) were repaired and restored by Jerry A. Jaleel, founder and director of the Jim Corbett Foundation.