Trip Report:
Kenya
Photo Safari
Concerns about Management
2016
I made some other notes while doing my trip report that I've omitted from the official trip report. These were editorial in nature in many ways, and honestly were somewhat depressing at times as the notes addressed the state of the Masai Mara and Samburu and the number of cows entering those areas. Estimates vary, but I've heard that as many as 200,000 cows enter the Masai Mara every night, although the more commonly cited number is half that, at 100,000. The repercussions of this are huge, as I discuss.
I omitted these notes so as to not taint what was actually a very productive photo trip. I have to admit, I really thought this would be my last big safari to Kenya. It will NOT be, let me make that clear before I go any further. Overall, the shooting was spectacular, and the area where we were disappointed we're simply eliminating from our safari next year. If you've read my report from last year you know that I was very disappointed, as cattle and sheep and goats were invading both Samburu and the Masai Mara. Last year, we could not find a 20 odd Lion pride near the southeastern area of the Mara where we had the cats in previous years. That absence was not a fluke. Those Lions are gone, as was most of the game from the southeastern section of the Mara, an area served by the beautiful Mara Sarova lodge, Mara Sopa, Mara Simba, and Keekorok. Keekorok is 'right on the edge,' and a good friend of mine had great shooting in that area so that area may not be dead, yet.
However, the Mara Triangle and Upper-Middle Masai Mara were quite good, and so much so that next year I'm squeezing in a private safari with two good friends to photograph in Samburu and these two areas of the Masai Mara. And that's saying something, as that trip will take up nearly all of my 'open' time between mid-July until the end of December.
So despite my misgivings from last year, Kenya is still a great shoot. In fact, on our last safari, the mini-Mara photo safari in late November, one of the participants said this was the best shooting he's had in Africa. He had photographed in Botswana, which has a stellar reputation, but he felt the thick brush and trees there made game-viewing and photography far more difficult than it is in the wide open grasslands of the Masai Mara. I told him I was surprised at his comment, and he told me he was surprised that I was surprised!
The bottom line, however, is Kenya's photography is still fantastic and we'll be going back next year and in 2018, too. The following is the trip report -- telling it exactly as it is.
Day 1. Nairobi to Samburu
We left Nairobi at 8:26 on the day of the famous Kenya Marathon, where many of the streets were closed for the racers and requiring us to do a circuitous route out of the city. We passed hundreds of white-shirted runners, joggers, and walkers along the way, a hopeless mass of racers if you were not in the top tier and aspired to place well. At one U-turn the race area was strewn with discarded plastic bottles from runners drinking and tossing the bottle aside.
While the drive to Samburu was once notoriously bad, with ruts in the road deep enough to swallow vehicles, the Chinese have constructed a road that extends north to Kenya’s border and is finally, for Kenya, a first class road. At Isiolo, once a frontier outpost, an international airport has been constructed, and with it, we fear, development will only increase, and eventually isolate Samburu just as Nairobi National Park is now a mere island in a sea of agriculture, industry, and housing.
Heavy woven bags of charcoal lined the highway out of Isiolo, white exclamation marks punctuating a landscape now denuded of the acacia trees cut to make this fuel. The land, grazed to the bone by sheep and goats, resembled a parking lot more than any wild area, with only scattered shrubs and, in patches, some ground cover that I presume was inedible.
At Archer’s Gate, the turn-off for us to reach Samburu Game Reserve and our wonderful lodge, Elephant Bedroom, a tented camp of only 12 tents, the Usaso Nyiro River was flowing, a surprising sight considering the drought the entire area had been having. Roadside pools marked a recent rain, and to our east verga and black storm clouds promised more, very needed rain, to come. The drive in to the gate at Samburu passes through Samburu villages and was littered with plastic trash, lining the road and the surrounding grounds almost like snow. Tanzania, like Rwanda, has now instituted a national clean-up day each month, and I hope Kenya eventually does so as well.
Fortunately, as we neared the entrance the trash dwindled to nothing. I was pleasantly surprised that the old, fourth-world pit toilets that were the only facilities at this entrance has been replaced with a tiled bathroom, with a flush toilet that works and with toilet paper supplied. While this seems silly to mention, it was a vast improvement from the past, and what is now standard fair in the Serengeti. It seems like Samburu’s management gets it.
Cattle grazing far inside the eastern section of Samburu Game Reserve. Last year this was potentially excusable, as there was a drought. This year the rains came, and if it was not for severe over-grazing, there would be grass outside the wildlife reserve.
We arrived at camp shortly after 5, met by our old friends, the camp manager Joseh, a great chef, David, and the various Samburu staff. Before dinner, Mary and I sat on our veranda and looked out over the river, entertaining ourselves by trying to figure out where the ants were carrying the bits of popcorn we had dropped. The white flakes, moving at random and sometimes colliding, reminding me of a Rosebowl Parade gone mad, as two dozen or more ants joined together to move the flake in one direction or another. Insect-eating bats swooped around us, catching insects we couldn’t see, and expending energy that just didn’t seem possible to replenish with the tiny bugs they might capture. It was good to be back!
Day 2. Samburu
Dawn broke with a cloudless sky, the sun a too-hot-to-watch orange ball over the river, framed by palms. We headed upriver, driving through surprisingly barren countryside. We passed a few Gerenuk early, small, scattered herds of Grants Gazelles, and a small herd of Impala. The area did not look over-grazed by cattle and goats as it had the year before, but cow dung and tracks did show evidence that the herds were here. Perhaps at night?
We had Lion tracks right outside of camp, and during the night the Olive Baboons created a loud ruckus, screaming and barking alarm calls, which may have been generated by the Lions or perhaps a passing leopard. Lion tracks were common, and I wondered if they were far-ranging because of a lack of food.
Day 4. Samburu
PM. Although the cloud cover appeared somewhat ominous, I bet that it would not rain, and it didn’t, at least not until after sunset when we were finishing up a Sundowner the camp gave us as a thank you for our long-term visits here. As we started our game drive the Isiolo and Buffalo Springs Reserve area were covered in heavy clouds and a wall of gray-black rain, jazzed up a bit by a horizontal rainbow that appeared when the western sky cleared. We headed to the mountain rocks looking for the leopard, and were very disappointed to see three different herds of cows soon after we left our lodge and reached the main road. These were the first cows we’d seen, unlike last year when there seemed to be herds everywhere, but it was still sad to see as it could herald the demise of Samburu, one of our favorite parks.
Day 6. Nakuru
The sky was clear at dawn. We had a cooked breakfast and then a three hour game drive, leaving our luggage in the rooms until we returned to the lodge to pack and to continue on to the Mara. Our first impression of the lake’s high water was correct – I don’t think we’ve ever seen it so high. A tiny scattering of pink Lesser Flamingos clustered on one shoreline; another, longer line of Greater Flamingos stretched out across the lake; and white patches of Pelicans marked a few spots on the shoreline. The Yellow –barked Acacia trees closest to the waterline, an area once hundreds of yards from water, are now dead. One of the crossroads towards a one-time favorite spot for flamingos is now flooded, with the sign marking the intersection an easy 100 yards or further from the nearest land. Large tracks of acacia forest, extending for hundreds of yards, is dead, and I suspect the water table and ground water is so high and saturated that the roots of acacias are slowly dying.
We addressed this last year, in the trip report, and I suspect that this condition had happened in the past, otherwise the acacia forest would be all across the crater floor. However, the last time this happened may have been hundreds of years ago, and the recovery of this forest, and those trees lining the shoreline, may take scores of years to come back. In my lifetime I doubt if I’ll see it, and it will also be interesting to see how much higher the lake fills.
No one has a reason for the change. Is it from deforestation, where rainfall in the mountains, that should be soaked up by the trees and roots, simply drains downhill, filling rivers, streams, and eventually this lake? Is the geology changing, and a plate shifting and lifting, tilting or sloshing the water table? I haven’t heard answers.
Day 7. Lower Mara
PM. The Lower Mara is dead. I hate to say it but I believe it is true. Just south of the Mara, in the northern Serengeti where cows are excluded the land and the wildlife is as it was in the Mara ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Two years ago, from our base here at Mara Sarova, we had a large pride of lions with nine cubs, several lionesses, and a big male or two. Last year, they were gone. It was possible, but unlikely, that we had missed them, but this year there is once again no trace.
Today we saw two Jackals, a dozen Elephants or so, and, tonight, one Lioness, although we were told that two others were in a lugga. With the absence of lions I would expect Cheetahs to flourish, but to do so they need food, and the number of Thompson’s Gazelles are few and life would be tough for this cat. We saw none. The land itself does not appear to have changed, although there are vast areas that are dotted with cow manure and grazed clean, but that barrenness could be the same if a natural fire had occurred. What has changed is the game – its scarcity. We saw two young Hyenas on the way in yesterday, and one tonight as we drove back into camp, and heard the ‘who-ooping’ of another last night. We did not hear lions.
Further out to the west, around the Hammerkop area, the grass was longer and there is where we saw a Serval today, but also plenty of cow droppings. Considering the amount of area we covered today we should have seen lions, or at least heard from other drivers about prides. True, our guide did hear about a pride, but we couldn’t find it, and we wonder if the guide who told him was even telling the truth.
We saw one small cluster of vultures today, and none that were nesting. If dead cows are poisoned, then leopards, lions, hyenas, jackals, and vultures all may die, as all of these animals will eat carrion. The fact that we saw so little, or none, of these animals would seem to indicate that this is so. Last night, around 4:30AM, we heard the tinkling of cow bells as Maasai drove a herd or herds through the night, either to or from grazing areas. At least this was an improvement over last year, when we’d see herds both in the morning and the evening, as indeed we did yesterday as we drove in, with scattered herds inside the park and close to the entrance.
The net impression we have is that the game is gone. Small scattered groups of topi or gazelles, few elephants, and virtually no predators – the area covered by Mara Simba, Mara Sarova, Keekorok, Mara Sopa, and those unfortunate lodges and camps actually outside the park boundaries – they’re dead, and certainly in October are simply not worth visiting. Ironically, where we did our game drive today is within sight of where, three weeks ago, we did game drives in Tanzania where we saw leopards, lions, cheetahs, klipspringers, black rhinos … the same animals that even ten years ago we’d surely see here.
Twenty years ago, we sometimes had on the rare exceptional day five different species of cat in a morning game drive (lion, leopard, cheetah, wild cat, caracal, serval in some combination), and getting the Big Five (lion, leopard, black rhino, buffalo, elephant) was fairly common. Today we were lucky to scrounge up three – buffalo, some elephants, and a few lions.
What is the future? Well, if the land isn’t lost, as it has outside the park boundaries with fencing going up everywhere, then the wildlife can recover. Private reserves in Kenya that were cattle ranches fifteen years ago are now thriving wildlife parks. Lions and leopards have enormous reproductive potential – a lion can have two to six cubs every two years, and females can breed at four years of age or less. If the land survives, and Kenya somehow, somehow gets its act together, the Mara can come back. We think, however, that its only future lies in being fenced, and completely, utterly excluding cattle and goats and sheep from the park. And keeping the predators in, too, as when game is scarce, predators would leave the park to kill livestock to survive, and obviously suffer the consequences. Hyenas from far distant areas may, in their search for food, scavenge kills outside the park, and risk being poisoned. Vultures go anywhere, and are thus vulnerable.
As it stands now, Kenya’s tourist revenue is declining, and will continue to do so. Lodges and camps, however, are continually being built, over-stressing the infrastructure, usurping critical habitat that leopards and lions use for denning, and degrading the entire experience. Just miles south, in Tanzania, where the Serengeti’s boundary is, for the most part, respected, game thrives. And in southern Africa, the future looks even brighter.
As I write this I look forward with some hope that the Mara Triangle, where we’ll go tomorrow, will be like normal, as that area is policed and preserved and maintained in orders of magnitude greater than the lower Mara. I don’t expect to be disappointed with that visit, as I am here, and depressed as well.
Day 11. Lower Mara - Mara Triangle at the Mara Bridge
At the Mara Bridge, on the Mara Triangle side, I found a very disturbing scene at the Ranger check in station. Dozens of insect-eating Bats were lying about, dead or dying. I picked a live one up very carefully, checking for an identification, and I asked one of the Rangers what killed them. He said some disease, but Mary and I could clearly smell the INSECTICIDE that surely had been used, killing the bats in their roost. Looking up at the roof’s peak I saw Bats still squirming from openings, unhealthy looking and sick. Before we left, I spoke with the Rangers there, playing stupid about the cause. I told them it was too bad the bats are dying since one bat can eat 10,000 mosquitos in a night, and these bats would be a great control for Malaria and Yellow Fever. They didn’t seem to know this, and perhaps, hopefully, they’ll not kill the bats in the future. Hopefully, anyone reading this will also CC this to the Head Ranger/Warden of the Mara Triangle and report this slaughter. If scores of people did this, it might make a difference.
As I wrote in the introduction to these trip reports, my initial reaction in seeing Samburu and the lower Mara last year was negative, but as the photography shows, we still had extremely productive safaris. As everyone who knows says, Kenya still delivers, and Mary and I have to agree. However, conditions are changing and long term, if things don’t change, the Mara will not be what we now have. I’d urge anyone interested in wildlife and photography to go now – in 2018, with us – for tourist dollars are absolutely important for the preservation of this land, and for a photographer, that money would be very, very well spent.
Trip Report:
Kenya
Photo Safari
Concerns about Management
2016
I made some other notes while doing my trip report that I've omitted from the official trip report. These were editorial in nature in many ways, and honestly were somewhat depressing at times as the notes addressed the state of the Masai Mara and Samburu and the number of cows entering those areas. Estimates vary, but I've heard that as many as 200,000 cows enter the Masai Mara every night, although the more commonly cited number is half that, at 100,000. The repercussions of this are huge, as I discuss.
I omitted these notes so as to not taint what was actually a very productive photo trip. I have to admit, I really thought this would be my last big safari to Kenya. It will NOT be, let me make that clear before I go any further. Overall, the shooting was spectacular, and the area where we were disappointed we're simply eliminating from our safari next year. If you've read my report from last year you know that I was very disappointed, as cattle and sheep and goats were invading both Samburu and the Masai Mara. Last year, we could not find a 20 odd Lion pride near the southeastern area of the Mara where we had the cats in previous years. That absence was not a fluke. Those Lions are gone, as was most of the game from the southeastern section of the Mara, an area served by the beautiful Mara Sarova lodge, Mara Sopa, Mara Simba, and Keekorok. Keekorok is 'right on the edge,' and a good friend of mine had great shooting in that area so that area may not be dead, yet.
However, the Mara Triangle and Upper-Middle Masai Mara were quite good, and so much so that next year I'm squeezing in a private safari with two good friends to photograph in Samburu and these two areas of the Masai Mara. And that's saying something, as that trip will take up nearly all of my 'open' time between mid-July until the end of December.
So despite my misgivings from last year, Kenya is still a great shoot. In fact, on our last safari, the mini-Mara photo safari in late November, one of the participants said this was the best shooting he's had in Africa. He had photographed in Botswana, which has a stellar reputation, but he felt the thick brush and trees there made game-viewing and photography far more difficult than it is in the wide open grasslands of the Masai Mara. I told him I was surprised at his comment, and he told me he was surprised that I was surprised!
The bottom line, however, is Kenya's photography is still fantastic and we'll be going back next year and in 2018, too. The following is the trip report -- telling it exactly as it is.
Day 1. Nairobi to Samburu
We left Nairobi at 8:26 on the day of the famous Kenya Marathon, where many of the streets were closed for the racers and requiring us to do a circuitous route out of the city. We passed hundreds of white-shirted runners, joggers, and walkers along the way, a hopeless mass of racers if you were not in the top tier and aspired to place well. At one U-turn the race area was strewn with discarded plastic bottles from runners drinking and tossing the bottle aside.
While the drive to Samburu was once notoriously bad, with ruts in the road deep enough to swallow vehicles, the Chinese have constructed a road that extends north to Kenya’s border and is finally, for Kenya, a first class road. At Isiolo, once a frontier outpost, an international airport has been constructed, and with it, we fear, development will only increase, and eventually isolate Samburu just as Nairobi National Park is now a mere island in a sea of agriculture, industry, and housing.
Heavy woven bags of charcoal lined the highway out of Isiolo, white exclamation marks punctuating a landscape now denuded of the acacia trees cut to make this fuel. The land, grazed to the bone by sheep and goats, resembled a parking lot more than any wild area, with only scattered shrubs and, in patches, some ground cover that I presume was inedible.
At Archer’s Gate, the turn-off for us to reach Samburu Game Reserve and our wonderful lodge, Elephant Bedroom, a tented camp of only 12 tents, the Usaso Nyiro River was flowing, a surprising sight considering the drought the entire area had been having. Roadside pools marked a recent rain, and to our east verga and black storm clouds promised more, very needed rain, to come. The drive in to the gate at Samburu passes through Samburu villages and was littered with plastic trash, lining the road and the surrounding grounds almost like snow. Tanzania, like Rwanda, has now instituted a national clean-up day each month, and I hope Kenya eventually does so as well.
Fortunately, as we neared the entrance the trash dwindled to nothing. I was pleasantly surprised that the old, fourth-world pit toilets that were the only facilities at this entrance has been replaced with a tiled bathroom, with a flush toilet that works and with toilet paper supplied. While this seems silly to mention, it was a vast improvement from the past, and what is now standard fair in the Serengeti. It seems like Samburu’s management gets it.
Cattle grazing far inside the eastern section of Samburu Game Reserve. Last year this was potentially excusable, as there was a drought. This year the rains came, and if it was not for severe over-grazing, there would be grass outside the wildlife reserve.
We arrived at camp shortly after 5, met by our old friends, the camp manager Joseh, a great chef, David, and the various Samburu staff. Before dinner, Mary and I sat on our veranda and looked out over the river, entertaining ourselves by trying to figure out where the ants were carrying the bits of popcorn we had dropped. The white flakes, moving at random and sometimes colliding, reminding me of a Rosebowl Parade gone mad, as two dozen or more ants joined together to move the flake in one direction or another. Insect-eating bats swooped around us, catching insects we couldn’t see, and expending energy that just didn’t seem possible to replenish with the tiny bugs they might capture. It was good to be back!
Day 2. Samburu
Dawn broke with a cloudless sky, the sun a too-hot-to-watch orange ball over the river, framed by palms. We headed upriver, driving through surprisingly barren countryside. We passed a few Gerenuk early, small, scattered herds of Grants Gazelles, and a small herd of Impala. The area did not look over-grazed by cattle and goats as it had the year before, but cow dung and tracks did show evidence that the herds were here. Perhaps at night?
We had Lion tracks right outside of camp, and during the night the Olive Baboons created a loud ruckus, screaming and barking alarm calls, which may have been generated by the Lions or perhaps a passing leopard. Lion tracks were common, and I wondered if they were far-ranging because of a lack of food.
Day 4. Samburu
PM. Although the cloud cover appeared somewhat ominous, I bet that it would not rain, and it didn’t, at least not until after sunset when we were finishing up a Sundowner the camp gave us as a thank you for our long-term visits here. As we started our game drive the Isiolo and Buffalo Springs Reserve area were covered in heavy clouds and a wall of gray-black rain, jazzed up a bit by a horizontal rainbow that appeared when the western sky cleared. We headed to the mountain rocks looking for the leopard, and were very disappointed to see three different herds of cows soon after we left our lodge and reached the main road. These were the first cows we’d seen, unlike last year when there seemed to be herds everywhere, but it was still sad to see as it could herald the demise of Samburu, one of our favorite parks.
Day 6. Nakuru
The sky was clear at dawn. We had a cooked breakfast and then a three hour game drive, leaving our luggage in the rooms until we returned to the lodge to pack and to continue on to the Mara. Our first impression of the lake’s high water was correct – I don’t think we’ve ever seen it so high. A tiny scattering of pink Lesser Flamingos clustered on one shoreline; another, longer line of Greater Flamingos stretched out across the lake; and white patches of Pelicans marked a few spots on the shoreline. The Yellow –barked Acacia trees closest to the waterline, an area once hundreds of yards from water, are now dead. One of the crossroads towards a one-time favorite spot for flamingos is now flooded, with the sign marking the intersection an easy 100 yards or further from the nearest land. Large tracks of acacia forest, extending for hundreds of yards, is dead, and I suspect the water table and ground water is so high and saturated that the roots of acacias are slowly dying.
We addressed this last year, in the trip report, and I suspect that this condition had happened in the past, otherwise the acacia forest would be all across the crater floor. However, the last time this happened may have been hundreds of years ago, and the recovery of this forest, and those trees lining the shoreline, may take scores of years to come back. In my lifetime I doubt if I’ll see it, and it will also be interesting to see how much higher the lake fills.
No one has a reason for the change. Is it from deforestation, where rainfall in the mountains, that should be soaked up by the trees and roots, simply drains downhill, filling rivers, streams, and eventually this lake? Is the geology changing, and a plate shifting and lifting, tilting or sloshing the water table? I haven’t heard answers.
Day 7. Lower Mara
PM. The Lower Mara is dead. I hate to say it but I believe it is true. Just south of the Mara, in the northern Serengeti where cows are excluded the land and the wildlife is as it was in the Mara ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Two years ago, from our base here at Mara Sarova, we had a large pride of lions with nine cubs, several lionesses, and a big male or two. Last year, they were gone. It was possible, but unlikely, that we had missed them, but this year there is once again no trace.
Today we saw two Jackals, a dozen Elephants or so, and, tonight, one Lioness, although we were told that two others were in a lugga. With the absence of lions I would expect Cheetahs to flourish, but to do so they need food, and the number of Thompson’s Gazelles are few and life would be tough for this cat. We saw none. The land itself does not appear to have changed, although there are vast areas that are dotted with cow manure and grazed clean, but that barrenness could be the same if a natural fire had occurred. What has changed is the game – its scarcity. We saw two young Hyenas on the way in yesterday, and one tonight as we drove back into camp, and heard the ‘who-ooping’ of another last night. We did not hear lions.
Further out to the west, around the Hammerkop area, the grass was longer and there is where we saw a Serval today, but also plenty of cow droppings. Considering the amount of area we covered today we should have seen lions, or at least heard from other drivers about prides. True, our guide did hear about a pride, but we couldn’t find it, and we wonder if the guide who told him was even telling the truth.
We saw one small cluster of vultures today, and none that were nesting. If dead cows are poisoned, then leopards, lions, hyenas, jackals, and vultures all may die, as all of these animals will eat carrion. The fact that we saw so little, or none, of these animals would seem to indicate that this is so. Last night, around 4:30AM, we heard the tinkling of cow bells as Maasai drove a herd or herds through the night, either to or from grazing areas. At least this was an improvement over last year, when we’d see herds both in the morning and the evening, as indeed we did yesterday as we drove in, with scattered herds inside the park and close to the entrance.
The net impression we have is that the game is gone. Small scattered groups of topi or gazelles, few elephants, and virtually no predators – the area covered by Mara Simba, Mara Sarova, Keekorok, Mara Sopa, and those unfortunate lodges and camps actually outside the park boundaries – they’re dead, and certainly in October are simply not worth visiting. Ironically, where we did our game drive today is within sight of where, three weeks ago, we did game drives in Tanzania where we saw leopards, lions, cheetahs, klipspringers, black rhinos … the same animals that even ten years ago we’d surely see here.
Twenty years ago, we sometimes had on the rare exceptional day five different species of cat in a morning game drive (lion, leopard, cheetah, wild cat, caracal, serval in some combination), and getting the Big Five (lion, leopard, black rhino, buffalo, elephant) was fairly common. Today we were lucky to scrounge up three – buffalo, some elephants, and a few lions.
What is the future? Well, if the land isn’t lost, as it has outside the park boundaries with fencing going up everywhere, then the wildlife can recover. Private reserves in Kenya that were cattle ranches fifteen years ago are now thriving wildlife parks. Lions and leopards have enormous reproductive potential – a lion can have two to six cubs every two years, and females can breed at four years of age or less. If the land survives, and Kenya somehow, somehow gets its act together, the Mara can come back. We think, however, that its only future lies in being fenced, and completely, utterly excluding cattle and goats and sheep from the park. And keeping the predators in, too, as when game is scarce, predators would leave the park to kill livestock to survive, and obviously suffer the consequences. Hyenas from far distant areas may, in their search for food, scavenge kills outside the park, and risk being poisoned. Vultures go anywhere, and are thus vulnerable.
As it stands now, Kenya’s tourist revenue is declining, and will continue to do so. Lodges and camps, however, are continually being built, over-stressing the infrastructure, usurping critical habitat that leopards and lions use for denning, and degrading the entire experience. Just miles south, in Tanzania, where the Serengeti’s boundary is, for the most part, respected, game thrives. And in southern Africa, the future looks even brighter.
As I write this I look forward with some hope that the Mara Triangle, where we’ll go tomorrow, will be like normal, as that area is policed and preserved and maintained in orders of magnitude greater than the lower Mara. I don’t expect to be disappointed with that visit, as I am here, and depressed as well.
Day 11. Lower Mara - Mara Triangle at the Mara Bridge
At the Mara Bridge, on the Mara Triangle side, I found a very disturbing scene at the Ranger check in station. Dozens of insect-eating Bats were lying about, dead or dying. I picked a live one up very carefully, checking for an identification, and I asked one of the Rangers what killed them. He said some disease, but Mary and I could clearly smell the INSECTICIDE that surely had been used, killing the bats in their roost. Looking up at the roof’s peak I saw Bats still squirming from openings, unhealthy looking and sick. Before we left, I spoke with the Rangers there, playing stupid about the cause. I told them it was too bad the bats are dying since one bat can eat 10,000 mosquitos in a night, and these bats would be a great control for Malaria and Yellow Fever. They didn’t seem to know this, and perhaps, hopefully, they’ll not kill the bats in the future. Hopefully, anyone reading this will also CC this to the Head Ranger/Warden of the Mara Triangle and report this slaughter. If scores of people did this, it might make a difference.
As I wrote in the introduction to these trip reports, my initial reaction in seeing Samburu and the lower Mara last year was negative, but as the photography shows, we still had extremely productive safaris. As everyone who knows says, Kenya still delivers, and Mary and I have to agree. However, conditions are changing and long term, if things don’t change, the Mara will not be what we now have. I’d urge anyone interested in wildlife and photography to go now – in 2018, with us – for tourist dollars are absolutely important for the preservation of this land, and for a photographer, that money would be very, very well spent.
Trip Report:
Kenya
Photo Safari
Concerns about Management
2016
I made some other notes while doing my trip report that I've omitted from the official trip report. These were editorial in nature in many ways, and honestly were somewhat depressing at times as the notes addressed the state of the Masai Mara and Samburu and the number of cows entering those areas. Estimates vary, but I've heard that as many as 200,000 cows enter the Masai Mara every night, although the more commonly cited number is half that, at 100,000. The repercussions of this are huge, as I discuss.
I omitted these notes so as to not taint what was actually a very productive photo trip. I have to admit, I really thought this would be my last big safari to Kenya. It will NOT be, let me make that clear before I go any further. Overall, the shooting was spectacular, and the area where we were disappointed we're simply eliminating from our safari next year. If you've read my report from last year you know that I was very disappointed, as cattle and sheep and goats were invading both Samburu and the Masai Mara. Last year, we could not find a 20 odd Lion pride near the southeastern area of the Mara where we had the cats in previous years. That absence was not a fluke. Those Lions are gone, as was most of the game from the southeastern section of the Mara, an area served by the beautiful Mara Sarova lodge, Mara Sopa, Mara Simba, and Keekorok. Keekorok is 'right on the edge,' and a good friend of mine had great shooting in that area so that area may not be dead, yet.
However, the Mara Triangle and Upper-Middle Masai Mara were quite good, and so much so that next year I'm squeezing in a private safari with two good friends to photograph in Samburu and these two areas of the Masai Mara. And that's saying something, as that trip will take up nearly all of my 'open' time between mid-July until the end of December.
So despite my misgivings from last year, Kenya is still a great shoot. In fact, on our last safari, the mini-Mara photo safari in late November, one of the participants said this was the best shooting he's had in Africa. He had photographed in Botswana, which has a stellar reputation, but he felt the thick brush and trees there made game-viewing and photography far more difficult than it is in the wide open grasslands of the Masai Mara. I told him I was surprised at his comment, and he told me he was surprised that I was surprised!
The bottom line, however, is Kenya's photography is still fantastic and we'll be going back next year and in 2018, too. The following is the trip report -- telling it exactly as it is.
Day 1. Nairobi to Samburu
We left Nairobi at 8:26 on the day of the famous Kenya Marathon, where many of the streets were closed for the racers and requiring us to do a circuitous route out of the city. We passed hundreds of white-shirted runners, joggers, and walkers along the way, a hopeless mass of racers if you were not in the top tier and aspired to place well. At one U-turn the race area was strewn with discarded plastic bottles from runners drinking and tossing the bottle aside.
While the drive to Samburu was once notoriously bad, with ruts in the road deep enough to swallow vehicles, the Chinese have constructed a road that extends north to Kenya’s border and is finally, for Kenya, a first class road. At Isiolo, once a frontier outpost, an international airport has been constructed, and with it, we fear, development will only increase, and eventually isolate Samburu just as Nairobi National Park is now a mere island in a sea of agriculture, industry, and housing.
Heavy woven bags of charcoal lined the highway out of Isiolo, white exclamation marks punctuating a landscape now denuded of the acacia trees cut to make this fuel. The land, grazed to the bone by sheep and goats, resembled a parking lot more than any wild area, with only scattered shrubs and, in patches, some ground cover that I presume was inedible.
At Archer’s Gate, the turn-off for us to reach Samburu Game Reserve and our wonderful lodge, Elephant Bedroom, a tented camp of only 12 tents, the Usaso Nyiro River was flowing, a surprising sight considering the drought the entire area had been having. Roadside pools marked a recent rain, and to our east verga and black storm clouds promised more, very needed rain, to come. The drive in to the gate at Samburu passes through Samburu villages and was littered with plastic trash, lining the road and the surrounding grounds almost like snow. Tanzania, like Rwanda, has now instituted a national clean-up day each month, and I hope Kenya eventually does so as well.
Fortunately, as we neared the entrance the trash dwindled to nothing. I was pleasantly surprised that the old, fourth-world pit toilets that were the only facilities at this entrance has been replaced with a tiled bathroom, with a flush toilet that works and with toilet paper supplied. While this seems silly to mention, it was a vast improvement from the past, and what is now standard fair in the Serengeti. It seems like Samburu’s management gets it.
Cattle grazing far inside the eastern section of Samburu Game Reserve. Last year this was potentially excusable, as there was a drought. This year the rains came, and if it was not for severe over-grazing, there would be grass outside the wildlife reserve.
We arrived at camp shortly after 5, met by our old friends, the camp manager Joseh, a great chef, David, and the various Samburu staff. Before dinner, Mary and I sat on our veranda and looked out over the river, entertaining ourselves by trying to figure out where the ants were carrying the bits of popcorn we had dropped. The white flakes, moving at random and sometimes colliding, reminding me of a Rosebowl Parade gone mad, as two dozen or more ants joined together to move the flake in one direction or another. Insect-eating bats swooped around us, catching insects we couldn’t see, and expending energy that just didn’t seem possible to replenish with the tiny bugs they might capture. It was good to be back!
Day 2. Samburu
Dawn broke with a cloudless sky, the sun a too-hot-to-watch orange ball over the river, framed by palms. We headed upriver, driving through surprisingly barren countryside. We passed a few Gerenuk early, small, scattered herds of Grants Gazelles, and a small herd of Impala. The area did not look over-grazed by cattle and goats as it had the year before, but cow dung and tracks did show evidence that the herds were here. Perhaps at night?
We had Lion tracks right outside of camp, and during the night the Olive Baboons created a loud ruckus, screaming and barking alarm calls, which may have been generated by the Lions or perhaps a passing leopard. Lion tracks were common, and I wondered if they were far-ranging because of a lack of food.
Day 4. Samburu
PM. Although the cloud cover appeared somewhat ominous, I bet that it would not rain, and it didn’t, at least not until after sunset when we were finishing up a Sundowner the camp gave us as a thank you for our long-term visits here. As we started our game drive the Isiolo and Buffalo Springs Reserve area were covered in heavy clouds and a wall of gray-black rain, jazzed up a bit by a horizontal rainbow that appeared when the western sky cleared. We headed to the mountain rocks looking for the leopard, and were very disappointed to see three different herds of cows soon after we left our lodge and reached the main road. These were the first cows we’d seen, unlike last year when there seemed to be herds everywhere, but it was still sad to see as it could herald the demise of Samburu, one of our favorite parks.
Day 6. Nakuru
The sky was clear at dawn. We had a cooked breakfast and then a three hour game drive, leaving our luggage in the rooms until we returned to the lodge to pack and to continue on to the Mara. Our first impression of the lake’s high water was correct – I don’t think we’ve ever seen it so high. A tiny scattering of pink Lesser Flamingos clustered on one shoreline; another, longer line of Greater Flamingos stretched out across the lake; and white patches of Pelicans marked a few spots on the shoreline. The Yellow –barked Acacia trees closest to the waterline, an area once hundreds of yards from water, are now dead. One of the crossroads towards a one-time favorite spot for flamingos is now flooded, with the sign marking the intersection an easy 100 yards or further from the nearest land. Large tracks of acacia forest, extending for hundreds of yards, is dead, and I suspect the water table and ground water is so high and saturated that the roots of acacias are slowly dying.
We addressed this last year, in the trip report, and I suspect that this condition had happened in the past, otherwise the acacia forest would be all across the crater floor. However, the last time this happened may have been hundreds of years ago, and the recovery of this forest, and those trees lining the shoreline, may take scores of years to come back. In my lifetime I doubt if I’ll see it, and it will also be interesting to see how much higher the lake fills.
No one has a reason for the change. Is it from deforestation, where rainfall in the mountains, that should be soaked up by the trees and roots, simply drains downhill, filling rivers, streams, and eventually this lake? Is the geology changing, and a plate shifting and lifting, tilting or sloshing the water table? I haven’t heard answers.
Day 7. Lower Mara
PM. The Lower Mara is dead. I hate to say it but I believe it is true. Just south of the Mara, in the northern Serengeti where cows are excluded the land and the wildlife is as it was in the Mara ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Two years ago, from our base here at Mara Sarova, we had a large pride of lions with nine cubs, several lionesses, and a big male or two. Last year, they were gone. It was possible, but unlikely, that we had missed them, but this year there is once again no trace.
Today we saw two Jackals, a dozen Elephants or so, and, tonight, one Lioness, although we were told that two others were in a lugga. With the absence of lions I would expect Cheetahs to flourish, but to do so they need food, and the number of Thompson’s Gazelles are few and life would be tough for this cat. We saw none. The land itself does not appear to have changed, although there are vast areas that are dotted with cow manure and grazed clean, but that barrenness could be the same if a natural fire had occurred. What has changed is the game – its scarcity. We saw two young Hyenas on the way in yesterday, and one tonight as we drove back into camp, and heard the ‘who-ooping’ of another last night. We did not hear lions.
Further out to the west, around the Hammerkop area, the grass was longer and there is where we saw a Serval today, but also plenty of cow droppings. Considering the amount of area we covered today we should have seen lions, or at least heard from other drivers about prides. True, our guide did hear about a pride, but we couldn’t find it, and we wonder if the guide who told him was even telling the truth.
We saw one small cluster of vultures today, and none that were nesting. If dead cows are poisoned, then leopards, lions, hyenas, jackals, and vultures all may die, as all of these animals will eat carrion. The fact that we saw so little, or none, of these animals would seem to indicate that this is so. Last night, around 4:30AM, we heard the tinkling of cow bells as Maasai drove a herd or herds through the night, either to or from grazing areas. At least this was an improvement over last year, when we’d see herds both in the morning and the evening, as indeed we did yesterday as we drove in, with scattered herds inside the park and close to the entrance.
The net impression we have is that the game is gone. Small scattered groups of topi or gazelles, few elephants, and virtually no predators – the area covered by Mara Simba, Mara Sarova, Keekorok, Mara Sopa, and those unfortunate lodges and camps actually outside the park boundaries – they’re dead, and certainly in October are simply not worth visiting. Ironically, where we did our game drive today is within sight of where, three weeks ago, we did game drives in Tanzania where we saw leopards, lions, cheetahs, klipspringers, black rhinos … the same animals that even ten years ago we’d surely see here.
Twenty years ago, we sometimes had on the rare exceptional day five different species of cat in a morning game drive (lion, leopard, cheetah, wild cat, caracal, serval in some combination), and getting the Big Five (lion, leopard, black rhino, buffalo, elephant) was fairly common. Today we were lucky to scrounge up three – buffalo, some elephants, and a few lions.
What is the future? Well, if the land isn’t lost, as it has outside the park boundaries with fencing going up everywhere, then the wildlife can recover. Private reserves in Kenya that were cattle ranches fifteen years ago are now thriving wildlife parks. Lions and leopards have enormous reproductive potential – a lion can have two to six cubs every two years, and females can breed at four years of age or less. If the land survives, and Kenya somehow, somehow gets its act together, the Mara can come back. We think, however, that its only future lies in being fenced, and completely, utterly excluding cattle and goats and sheep from the park. And keeping the predators in, too, as when game is scarce, predators would leave the park to kill livestock to survive, and obviously suffer the consequences. Hyenas from far distant areas may, in their search for food, scavenge kills outside the park, and risk being poisoned. Vultures go anywhere, and are thus vulnerable.
As it stands now, Kenya’s tourist revenue is declining, and will continue to do so. Lodges and camps, however, are continually being built, over-stressing the infrastructure, usurping critical habitat that leopards and lions use for denning, and degrading the entire experience. Just miles south, in Tanzania, where the Serengeti’s boundary is, for the most part, respected, game thrives. And in southern Africa, the future looks even brighter.
As I write this I look forward with some hope that the Mara Triangle, where we’ll go tomorrow, will be like normal, as that area is policed and preserved and maintained in orders of magnitude greater than the lower Mara. I don’t expect to be disappointed with that visit, as I am here, and depressed as well.
Day 11. Lower Mara - Mara Triangle at the Mara Bridge
At the Mara Bridge, on the Mara Triangle side, I found a very disturbing scene at the Ranger check in station. Dozens of insect-eating Bats were lying about, dead or dying. I picked a live one up very carefully, checking for an identification, and I asked one of the Rangers what killed them. He said some disease, but Mary and I could clearly smell the INSECTICIDE that surely had been used, killing the bats in their roost. Looking up at the roof’s peak I saw Bats still squirming from openings, unhealthy looking and sick. Before we left, I spoke with the Rangers there, playing stupid about the cause. I told them it was too bad the bats are dying since one bat can eat 10,000 mosquitos in a night, and these bats would be a great control for Malaria and Yellow Fever. They didn’t seem to know this, and perhaps, hopefully, they’ll not kill the bats in the future. Hopefully, anyone reading this will also CC this to the Head Ranger/Warden of the Mara Triangle and report this slaughter. If scores of people did this, it might make a difference.
As I wrote in the introduction to these trip reports, my initial reaction in seeing Samburu and the lower Mara last year was negative, but as the photography shows, we still had extremely productive safaris. As everyone who knows says, Kenya still delivers, and Mary and I have to agree. However, conditions are changing and long term, if things don’t change, the Mara will not be what we now have. I’d urge anyone interested in wildlife and photography to go now – in 2018, with us – for tourist dollars are absolutely important for the preservation of this land, and for a photographer, that money would be very, very well spent.
Trip Report:
Kenya
Photo Safari
Concerns about Management
2016
I made some other notes while doing my trip report that I've omitted from the official trip report. These were editorial in nature in many ways, and honestly were somewhat depressing at times as the notes addressed the state of the Masai Mara and Samburu and the number of cows entering those areas. Estimates vary, but I've heard that as many as 200,000 cows enter the Masai Mara every night, although the more commonly cited number is half that, at 100,000. The repercussions of this are huge, as I discuss.
I omitted these notes so as to not taint what was actually a very productive photo trip. I have to admit, I really thought this would be my last big safari to Kenya. It will NOT be, let me make that clear before I go any further. Overall, the shooting was spectacular, and the area where we were disappointed we're simply eliminating from our safari next year. If you've read my report from last year you know that I was very disappointed, as cattle and sheep and goats were invading both Samburu and the Masai Mara. Last year, we could not find a 20 odd Lion pride near the southeastern area of the Mara where we had the cats in previous years. That absence was not a fluke. Those Lions are gone, as was most of the game from the southeastern section of the Mara, an area served by the beautiful Mara Sarova lodge, Mara Sopa, Mara Simba, and Keekorok. Keekorok is 'right on the edge,' and a good friend of mine had great shooting in that area so that area may not be dead, yet.
However, the Mara Triangle and Upper-Middle Masai Mara were quite good, and so much so that next year I'm squeezing in a private safari with two good friends to photograph in Samburu and these two areas of the Masai Mara. And that's saying something, as that trip will take up nearly all of my 'open' time between mid-July until the end of December.
So despite my misgivings from last year, Kenya is still a great shoot. In fact, on our last safari, the mini-Mara photo safari in late November, one of the participants said this was the best shooting he's had in Africa. He had photographed in Botswana, which has a stellar reputation, but he felt the thick brush and trees there made game-viewing and photography far more difficult than it is in the wide open grasslands of the Masai Mara. I told him I was surprised at his comment, and he told me he was surprised that I was surprised!
The bottom line, however, is Kenya's photography is still fantastic and we'll be going back next year and in 2018, too. The following is the trip report -- telling it exactly as it is.
Day 1. Nairobi to Samburu
We left Nairobi at 8:26 on the day of the famous Kenya Marathon, where many of the streets were closed for the racers and requiring us to do a circuitous route out of the city. We passed hundreds of white-shirted runners, joggers, and walkers along the way, a hopeless mass of racers if you were not in the top tier and aspired to place well. At one U-turn the race area was strewn with discarded plastic bottles from runners drinking and tossing the bottle aside.
While the drive to Samburu was once notoriously bad, with ruts in the road deep enough to swallow vehicles, the Chinese have constructed a road that extends north to Kenya’s border and is finally, for Kenya, a first class road. At Isiolo, once a frontier outpost, an international airport has been constructed, and with it, we fear, development will only increase, and eventually isolate Samburu just as Nairobi National Park is now a mere island in a sea of agriculture, industry, and housing.
Heavy woven bags of charcoal lined the highway out of Isiolo, white exclamation marks punctuating a landscape now denuded of the acacia trees cut to make this fuel. The land, grazed to the bone by sheep and goats, resembled a parking lot more than any wild area, with only scattered shrubs and, in patches, some ground cover that I presume was inedible.
At Archer’s Gate, the turn-off for us to reach Samburu Game Reserve and our wonderful lodge, Elephant Bedroom, a tented camp of only 12 tents, the Usaso Nyiro River was flowing, a surprising sight considering the drought the entire area had been having. Roadside pools marked a recent rain, and to our east verga and black storm clouds promised more, very needed rain, to come. The drive in to the gate at Samburu passes through Samburu villages and was littered with plastic trash, lining the road and the surrounding grounds almost like snow. Tanzania, like Rwanda, has now instituted a national clean-up day each month, and I hope Kenya eventually does so as well.
Fortunately, as we neared the entrance the trash dwindled to nothing. I was pleasantly surprised that the old, fourth-world pit toilets that were the only facilities at this entrance has been replaced with a tiled bathroom, with a flush toilet that works and with toilet paper supplied. While this seems silly to mention, it was a vast improvement from the past, and what is now standard fair in the Serengeti. It seems like Samburu’s management gets it.
Cattle grazing far inside the eastern section of Samburu Game Reserve. Last year this was potentially excusable, as there was a drought. This year the rains came, and if it was not for severe over-grazing, there would be grass outside the wildlife reserve.
We arrived at camp shortly after 5, met by our old friends, the camp manager Joseh, a great chef, David, and the various Samburu staff. Before dinner, Mary and I sat on our veranda and looked out over the river, entertaining ourselves by trying to figure out where the ants were carrying the bits of popcorn we had dropped. The white flakes, moving at random and sometimes colliding, reminding me of a Rosebowl Parade gone mad, as two dozen or more ants joined together to move the flake in one direction or another. Insect-eating bats swooped around us, catching insects we couldn’t see, and expending energy that just didn’t seem possible to replenish with the tiny bugs they might capture. It was good to be back!
Day 2. Samburu
Dawn broke with a cloudless sky, the sun a too-hot-to-watch orange ball over the river, framed by palms. We headed upriver, driving through surprisingly barren countryside. We passed a few Gerenuk early, small, scattered herds of Grants Gazelles, and a small herd of Impala. The area did not look over-grazed by cattle and goats as it had the year before, but cow dung and tracks did show evidence that the herds were here. Perhaps at night?
We had Lion tracks right outside of camp, and during the night the Olive Baboons created a loud ruckus, screaming and barking alarm calls, which may have been generated by the Lions or perhaps a passing leopard. Lion tracks were common, and I wondered if they were far-ranging because of a lack of food.
Day 4. Samburu
PM. Although the cloud cover appeared somewhat ominous, I bet that it would not rain, and it didn’t, at least not until after sunset when we were finishing up a Sundowner the camp gave us as a thank you for our long-term visits here. As we started our game drive the Isiolo and Buffalo Springs Reserve area were covered in heavy clouds and a wall of gray-black rain, jazzed up a bit by a horizontal rainbow that appeared when the western sky cleared. We headed to the mountain rocks looking for the leopard, and were very disappointed to see three different herds of cows soon after we left our lodge and reached the main road. These were the first cows we’d seen, unlike last year when there seemed to be herds everywhere, but it was still sad to see as it could herald the demise of Samburu, one of our favorite parks.
Day 6. Nakuru
The sky was clear at dawn. We had a cooked breakfast and then a three hour game drive, leaving our luggage in the rooms until we returned to the lodge to pack and to continue on to the Mara. Our first impression of the lake’s high water was correct – I don’t think we’ve ever seen it so high. A tiny scattering of pink Lesser Flamingos clustered on one shoreline; another, longer line of Greater Flamingos stretched out across the lake; and white patches of Pelicans marked a few spots on the shoreline. The Yellow –barked Acacia trees closest to the waterline, an area once hundreds of yards from water, are now dead. One of the crossroads towards a one-time favorite spot for flamingos is now flooded, with the sign marking the intersection an easy 100 yards or further from the nearest land. Large tracks of acacia forest, extending for hundreds of yards, is dead, and I suspect the water table and ground water is so high and saturated that the roots of acacias are slowly dying.
We addressed this last year, in the trip report, and I suspect that this condition had happened in the past, otherwise the acacia forest would be all across the crater floor. However, the last time this happened may have been hundreds of years ago, and the recovery of this forest, and those trees lining the shoreline, may take scores of years to come back. In my lifetime I doubt if I’ll see it, and it will also be interesting to see how much higher the lake fills.
No one has a reason for the change. Is it from deforestation, where rainfall in the mountains, that should be soaked up by the trees and roots, simply drains downhill, filling rivers, streams, and eventually this lake? Is the geology changing, and a plate shifting and lifting, tilting or sloshing the water table? I haven’t heard answers.
Day 7. Lower Mara
PM. The Lower Mara is dead. I hate to say it but I believe it is true. Just south of the Mara, in the northern Serengeti where cows are excluded the land and the wildlife is as it was in the Mara ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Two years ago, from our base here at Mara Sarova, we had a large pride of lions with nine cubs, several lionesses, and a big male or two. Last year, they were gone. It was possible, but unlikely, that we had missed them, but this year there is once again no trace.
Today we saw two Jackals, a dozen Elephants or so, and, tonight, one Lioness, although we were told that two others were in a lugga. With the absence of lions I would expect Cheetahs to flourish, but to do so they need food, and the number of Thompson’s Gazelles are few and life would be tough for this cat. We saw none. The land itself does not appear to have changed, although there are vast areas that are dotted with cow manure and grazed clean, but that barrenness could be the same if a natural fire had occurred. What has changed is the game – its scarcity. We saw two young Hyenas on the way in yesterday, and one tonight as we drove back into camp, and heard the ‘who-ooping’ of another last night. We did not hear lions.
Further out to the west, around the Hammerkop area, the grass was longer and there is where we saw a Serval today, but also plenty of cow droppings. Considering the amount of area we covered today we should have seen lions, or at least heard from other drivers about prides. True, our guide did hear about a pride, but we couldn’t find it, and we wonder if the guide who told him was even telling the truth.
We saw one small cluster of vultures today, and none that were nesting. If dead cows are poisoned, then leopards, lions, hyenas, jackals, and vultures all may die, as all of these animals will eat carrion. The fact that we saw so little, or none, of these animals would seem to indicate that this is so. Last night, around 4:30AM, we heard the tinkling of cow bells as Maasai drove a herd or herds through the night, either to or from grazing areas. At least this was an improvement over last year, when we’d see herds both in the morning and the evening, as indeed we did yesterday as we drove in, with scattered herds inside the park and close to the entrance.
The net impression we have is that the game is gone. Small scattered groups of topi or gazelles, few elephants, and virtually no predators – the area covered by Mara Simba, Mara Sarova, Keekorok, Mara Sopa, and those unfortunate lodges and camps actually outside the park boundaries – they’re dead, and certainly in October are simply not worth visiting. Ironically, where we did our game drive today is within sight of where, three weeks ago, we did game drives in Tanzania where we saw leopards, lions, cheetahs, klipspringers, black rhinos … the same animals that even ten years ago we’d surely see here.
Twenty years ago, we sometimes had on the rare exceptional day five different species of cat in a morning game drive (lion, leopard, cheetah, wild cat, caracal, serval in some combination), and getting the Big Five (lion, leopard, black rhino, buffalo, elephant) was fairly common. Today we were lucky to scrounge up three – buffalo, some elephants, and a few lions.
What is the future? Well, if the land isn’t lost, as it has outside the park boundaries with fencing going up everywhere, then the wildlife can recover. Private reserves in Kenya that were cattle ranches fifteen years ago are now thriving wildlife parks. Lions and leopards have enormous reproductive potential – a lion can have two to six cubs every two years, and females can breed at four years of age or less. If the land survives, and Kenya somehow, somehow gets its act together, the Mara can come back. We think, however, that its only future lies in being fenced, and completely, utterly excluding cattle and goats and sheep from the park. And keeping the predators in, too, as when game is scarce, predators would leave the park to kill livestock to survive, and obviously suffer the consequences. Hyenas from far distant areas may, in their search for food, scavenge kills outside the park, and risk being poisoned. Vultures go anywhere, and are thus vulnerable.
As it stands now, Kenya’s tourist revenue is declining, and will continue to do so. Lodges and camps, however, are continually being built, over-stressing the infrastructure, usurping critical habitat that leopards and lions use for denning, and degrading the entire experience. Just miles south, in Tanzania, where the Serengeti’s boundary is, for the most part, respected, game thrives. And in southern Africa, the future looks even brighter.
As I write this I look forward with some hope that the Mara Triangle, where we’ll go tomorrow, will be like normal, as that area is policed and preserved and maintained in orders of magnitude greater than the lower Mara. I don’t expect to be disappointed with that visit, as I am here, and depressed as well.
Day 11. Lower Mara - Mara Triangle at the Mara Bridge
At the Mara Bridge, on the Mara Triangle side, I found a very disturbing scene at the Ranger check in station. Dozens of insect-eating Bats were lying about, dead or dying. I picked a live one up very carefully, checking for an identification, and I asked one of the Rangers what killed them. He said some disease, but Mary and I could clearly smell the INSECTICIDE that surely had been used, killing the bats in their roost. Looking up at the roof’s peak I saw Bats still squirming from openings, unhealthy looking and sick. Before we left, I spoke with the Rangers there, playing stupid about the cause. I told them it was too bad the bats are dying since one bat can eat 10,000 mosquitos in a night, and these bats would be a great control for Malaria and Yellow Fever. They didn’t seem to know this, and perhaps, hopefully, they’ll not kill the bats in the future. Hopefully, anyone reading this will also CC this to the Head Ranger/Warden of the Mara Triangle and report this slaughter. If scores of people did this, it might make a difference.
As I wrote in the introduction to these trip reports, my initial reaction in seeing Samburu and the lower Mara last year was negative, but as the photography shows, we still had extremely productive safaris. As everyone who knows says, Kenya still delivers, and Mary and I have to agree. However, conditions are changing and long term, if things don’t change, the Mara will not be what we now have. I’d urge anyone interested in wildlife and photography to go now – in 2018, with us – for tourist dollars are absolutely important for the preservation of this land, and for a photographer, that money would be very, very well spent.
Trip Report:
Kenya
Photo Safari
Concerns about Management
2016
I made some other notes while doing my trip report that I've omitted from the official trip report. These were editorial in nature in many ways, and honestly were somewhat depressing at times as the notes addressed the state of the Masai Mara and Samburu and the number of cows entering those areas. Estimates vary, but I've heard that as many as 200,000 cows enter the Masai Mara every night, although the more commonly cited number is half that, at 100,000. The repercussions of this are huge, as I discuss.
I omitted these notes so as to not taint what was actually a very productive photo trip. I have to admit, I really thought this would be my last big safari to Kenya. It will NOT be, let me make that clear before I go any further. Overall, the shooting was spectacular, and the area where we were disappointed we're simply eliminating from our safari next year. If you've read my report from last year you know that I was very disappointed, as cattle and sheep and goats were invading both Samburu and the Masai Mara. Last year, we could not find a 20 odd Lion pride near the southeastern area of the Mara where we had the cats in previous years. That absence was not a fluke. Those Lions are gone, as was most of the game from the southeastern section of the Mara, an area served by the beautiful Mara Sarova lodge, Mara Sopa, Mara Simba, and Keekorok. Keekorok is 'right on the edge,' and a good friend of mine had great shooting in that area so that area may not be dead, yet.
However, the Mara Triangle and Upper-Middle Masai Mara were quite good, and so much so that next year I'm squeezing in a private safari with two good friends to photograph in Samburu and these two areas of the Masai Mara. And that's saying something, as that trip will take up nearly all of my 'open' time between mid-July until the end of December.
So despite my misgivings from last year, Kenya is still a great shoot. In fact, on our last safari, the mini-Mara photo safari in late November, one of the participants said this was the best shooting he's had in Africa. He had photographed in Botswana, which has a stellar reputation, but he felt the thick brush and trees there made game-viewing and photography far more difficult than it is in the wide open grasslands of the Masai Mara. I told him I was surprised at his comment, and he told me he was surprised that I was surprised!
The bottom line, however, is Kenya's photography is still fantastic and we'll be going back next year and in 2018, too. The following is the trip report -- telling it exactly as it is.
Day 1. Nairobi to Samburu
We left Nairobi at 8:26 on the day of the famous Kenya Marathon, where many of the streets were closed for the racers and requiring us to do a circuitous route out of the city. We passed hundreds of white-shirted runners, joggers, and walkers along the way, a hopeless mass of racers if you were not in the top tier and aspired to place well. At one U-turn the race area was strewn with discarded plastic bottles from runners drinking and tossing the bottle aside.
While the drive to Samburu was once notoriously bad, with ruts in the road deep enough to swallow vehicles, the Chinese have constructed a road that extends north to Kenya’s border and is finally, for Kenya, a first class road. At Isiolo, once a frontier outpost, an international airport has been constructed, and with it, we fear, development will only increase, and eventually isolate Samburu just as Nairobi National Park is now a mere island in a sea of agriculture, industry, and housing.
Heavy woven bags of charcoal lined the highway out of Isiolo, white exclamation marks punctuating a landscape now denuded of the acacia trees cut to make this fuel. The land, grazed to the bone by sheep and goats, resembled a parking lot more than any wild area, with only scattered shrubs and, in patches, some ground cover that I presume was inedible.
At Archer’s Gate, the turn-off for us to reach Samburu Game Reserve and our wonderful lodge, Elephant Bedroom, a tented camp of only 12 tents, the Usaso Nyiro River was flowing, a surprising sight considering the drought the entire area had been having. Roadside pools marked a recent rain, and to our east verga and black storm clouds promised more, very needed rain, to come. The drive in to the gate at Samburu passes through Samburu villages and was littered with plastic trash, lining the road and the surrounding grounds almost like snow. Tanzania, like Rwanda, has now instituted a national clean-up day each month, and I hope Kenya eventually does so as well.
Fortunately, as we neared the entrance the trash dwindled to nothing. I was pleasantly surprised that the old, fourth-world pit toilets that were the only facilities at this entrance has been replaced with a tiled bathroom, with a flush toilet that works and with toilet paper supplied. While this seems silly to mention, it was a vast improvement from the past, and what is now standard fair in the Serengeti. It seems like Samburu’s management gets it.
Cattle grazing far inside the eastern section of Samburu Game Reserve. Last year this was potentially excusable, as there was a drought. This year the rains came, and if it was not for severe over-grazing, there would be grass outside the wildlife reserve.
We arrived at camp shortly after 5, met by our old friends, the camp manager Joseh, a great chef, David, and the various Samburu staff. Before dinner, Mary and I sat on our veranda and looked out over the river, entertaining ourselves by trying to figure out where the ants were carrying the bits of popcorn we had dropped. The white flakes, moving at random and sometimes colliding, reminding me of a Rosebowl Parade gone mad, as two dozen or more ants joined together to move the flake in one direction or another. Insect-eating bats swooped around us, catching insects we couldn’t see, and expending energy that just didn’t seem possible to replenish with the tiny bugs they might capture. It was good to be back!
Day 2. Samburu
Dawn broke with a cloudless sky, the sun a too-hot-to-watch orange ball over the river, framed by palms. We headed upriver, driving through surprisingly barren countryside. We passed a few Gerenuk early, small, scattered herds of Grants Gazelles, and a small herd of Impala. The area did not look over-grazed by cattle and goats as it had the year before, but cow dung and tracks did show evidence that the herds were here. Perhaps at night?
We had Lion tracks right outside of camp, and during the night the Olive Baboons created a loud ruckus, screaming and barking alarm calls, which may have been generated by the Lions or perhaps a passing leopard. Lion tracks were common, and I wondered if they were far-ranging because of a lack of food.
Day 4. Samburu
PM. Although the cloud cover appeared somewhat ominous, I bet that it would not rain, and it didn’t, at least not until after sunset when we were finishing up a Sundowner the camp gave us as a thank you for our long-term visits here. As we started our game drive the Isiolo and Buffalo Springs Reserve area were covered in heavy clouds and a wall of gray-black rain, jazzed up a bit by a horizontal rainbow that appeared when the western sky cleared. We headed to the mountain rocks looking for the leopard, and were very disappointed to see three different herds of cows soon after we left our lodge and reached the main road. These were the first cows we’d seen, unlike last year when there seemed to be herds everywhere, but it was still sad to see as it could herald the demise of Samburu, one of our favorite parks.
Day 6. Nakuru
The sky was clear at dawn. We had a cooked breakfast and then a three hour game drive, leaving our luggage in the rooms until we returned to the lodge to pack and to continue on to the Mara. Our first impression of the lake’s high water was correct – I don’t think we’ve ever seen it so high. A tiny scattering of pink Lesser Flamingos clustered on one shoreline; another, longer line of Greater Flamingos stretched out across the lake; and white patches of Pelicans marked a few spots on the shoreline. The Yellow –barked Acacia trees closest to the waterline, an area once hundreds of yards from water, are now dead. One of the crossroads towards a one-time favorite spot for flamingos is now flooded, with the sign marking the intersection an easy 100 yards or further from the nearest land. Large tracks of acacia forest, extending for hundreds of yards, is dead, and I suspect the water table and ground water is so high and saturated that the roots of acacias are slowly dying.
We addressed this last year, in the trip report, and I suspect that this condition had happened in the past, otherwise the acacia forest would be all across the crater floor. However, the last time this happened may have been hundreds of years ago, and the recovery of this forest, and those trees lining the shoreline, may take scores of years to come back. In my lifetime I doubt if I’ll see it, and it will also be interesting to see how much higher the lake fills.
No one has a reason for the change. Is it from deforestation, where rainfall in the mountains, that should be soaked up by the trees and roots, simply drains downhill, filling rivers, streams, and eventually this lake? Is the geology changing, and a plate shifting and lifting, tilting or sloshing the water table? I haven’t heard answers.
Day 7. Lower Mara
PM. The Lower Mara is dead. I hate to say it but I believe it is true. Just south of the Mara, in the northern Serengeti where cows are excluded the land and the wildlife is as it was in the Mara ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Two years ago, from our base here at Mara Sarova, we had a large pride of lions with nine cubs, several lionesses, and a big male or two. Last year, they were gone. It was possible, but unlikely, that we had missed them, but this year there is once again no trace.
Today we saw two Jackals, a dozen Elephants or so, and, tonight, one Lioness, although we were told that two others were in a lugga. With the absence of lions I would expect Cheetahs to flourish, but to do so they need food, and the number of Thompson’s Gazelles are few and life would be tough for this cat. We saw none. The land itself does not appear to have changed, although there are vast areas that are dotted with cow manure and grazed clean, but that barrenness could be the same if a natural fire had occurred. What has changed is the game – its scarcity. We saw two young Hyenas on the way in yesterday, and one tonight as we drove back into camp, and heard the ‘who-ooping’ of another last night. We did not hear lions.
Further out to the west, around the Hammerkop area, the grass was longer and there is where we saw a Serval today, but also plenty of cow droppings. Considering the amount of area we covered today we should have seen lions, or at least heard from other drivers about prides. True, our guide did hear about a pride, but we couldn’t find it, and we wonder if the guide who told him was even telling the truth.
We saw one small cluster of vultures today, and none that were nesting. If dead cows are poisoned, then leopards, lions, hyenas, jackals, and vultures all may die, as all of these animals will eat carrion. The fact that we saw so little, or none, of these animals would seem to indicate that this is so. Last night, around 4:30AM, we heard the tinkling of cow bells as Maasai drove a herd or herds through the night, either to or from grazing areas. At least this was an improvement over last year, when we’d see herds both in the morning and the evening, as indeed we did yesterday as we drove in, with scattered herds inside the park and close to the entrance.
The net impression we have is that the game is gone. Small scattered groups of topi or gazelles, few elephants, and virtually no predators – the area covered by Mara Simba, Mara Sarova, Keekorok, Mara Sopa, and those unfortunate lodges and camps actually outside the park boundaries – they’re dead, and certainly in October are simply not worth visiting. Ironically, where we did our game drive today is within sight of where, three weeks ago, we did game drives in Tanzania where we saw leopards, lions, cheetahs, klipspringers, black rhinos … the same animals that even ten years ago we’d surely see here.
Twenty years ago, we sometimes had on the rare exceptional day five different species of cat in a morning game drive (lion, leopard, cheetah, wild cat, caracal, serval in some combination), and getting the Big Five (lion, leopard, black rhino, buffalo, elephant) was fairly common. Today we were lucky to scrounge up three – buffalo, some elephants, and a few lions.
What is the future? Well, if the land isn’t lost, as it has outside the park boundaries with fencing going up everywhere, then the wildlife can recover. Private reserves in Kenya that were cattle ranches fifteen years ago are now thriving wildlife parks. Lions and leopards have enormous reproductive potential – a lion can have two to six cubs every two years, and females can breed at four years of age or less. If the land survives, and Kenya somehow, somehow gets its act together, the Mara can come back. We think, however, that its only future lies in being fenced, and completely, utterly excluding cattle and goats and sheep from the park. And keeping the predators in, too, as when game is scarce, predators would leave the park to kill livestock to survive, and obviously suffer the consequences. Hyenas from far distant areas may, in their search for food, scavenge kills outside the park, and risk being poisoned. Vultures go anywhere, and are thus vulnerable.
As it stands now, Kenya’s tourist revenue is declining, and will continue to do so. Lodges and camps, however, are continually being built, over-stressing the infrastructure, usurping critical habitat that leopards and lions use for denning, and degrading the entire experience. Just miles south, in Tanzania, where the Serengeti’s boundary is, for the most part, respected, game thrives. And in southern Africa, the future looks even brighter.
As I write this I look forward with some hope that the Mara Triangle, where we’ll go tomorrow, will be like normal, as that area is policed and preserved and maintained in orders of magnitude greater than the lower Mara. I don’t expect to be disappointed with that visit, as I am here, and depressed as well.
Day 11. Lower Mara - Mara Triangle at the Mara Bridge
At the Mara Bridge, on the Mara Triangle side, I found a very disturbing scene at the Ranger check in station. Dozens of insect-eating Bats were lying about, dead or dying. I picked a live one up very carefully, checking for an identification, and I asked one of the Rangers what killed them. He said some disease, but Mary and I could clearly smell the INSECTICIDE that surely had been used, killing the bats in their roost. Looking up at the roof’s peak I saw Bats still squirming from openings, unhealthy looking and sick. Before we left, I spoke with the Rangers there, playing stupid about the cause. I told them it was too bad the bats are dying since one bat can eat 10,000 mosquitos in a night, and these bats would be a great control for Malaria and Yellow Fever. They didn’t seem to know this, and perhaps, hopefully, they’ll not kill the bats in the future. Hopefully, anyone reading this will also CC this to the Head Ranger/Warden of the Mara Triangle and report this slaughter. If scores of people did this, it might make a difference.
As I wrote in the introduction to these trip reports, my initial reaction in seeing Samburu and the lower Mara last year was negative, but as the photography shows, we still had extremely productive safaris. As everyone who knows says, Kenya still delivers, and Mary and I have to agree. However, conditions are changing and long term, if things don’t change, the Mara will not be what we now have. I’d urge anyone interested in wildlife and photography to go now – in 2018, with us – for tourist dollars are absolutely important for the preservation of this land, and for a photographer, that money would be very, very well spent.
Trip Report:
Kenya
Photo Safari
Concerns about Management
2016
I made some other notes while doing my trip report that I've omitted from the official trip report. These were editorial in nature in many ways, and honestly were somewhat depressing at times as the notes addressed the state of the Masai Mara and Samburu and the number of cows entering those areas. Estimates vary, but I've heard that as many as 200,000 cows enter the Masai Mara every night, although the more commonly cited number is half that, at 100,000. The repercussions of this are huge, as I discuss.
I omitted these notes so as to not taint what was actually a very productive photo trip. I have to admit, I really thought this would be my last big safari to Kenya. It will NOT be, let me make that clear before I go any further. Overall, the shooting was spectacular, and the area where we were disappointed we're simply eliminating from our safari next year. If you've read my report from last year you know that I was very disappointed, as cattle and sheep and goats were invading both Samburu and the Masai Mara. Last year, we could not find a 20 odd Lion pride near the southeastern area of the Mara where we had the cats in previous years. That absence was not a fluke. Those Lions are gone, as was most of the game from the southeastern section of the Mara, an area served by the beautiful Mara Sarova lodge, Mara Sopa, Mara Simba, and Keekorok. Keekorok is 'right on the edge,' and a good friend of mine had great shooting in that area so that area may not be dead, yet.
However, the Mara Triangle and Upper-Middle Masai Mara were quite good, and so much so that next year I'm squeezing in a private safari with two good friends to photograph in Samburu and these two areas of the Masai Mara. And that's saying something, as that trip will take up nearly all of my 'open' time between mid-July until the end of December.
So despite my misgivings from last year, Kenya is still a great shoot. In fact, on our last safari, the mini-Mara photo safari in late November, one of the participants said this was the best shooting he's had in Africa. He had photographed in Botswana, which has a stellar reputation, but he felt the thick brush and trees there made game-viewing and photography far more difficult than it is in the wide open grasslands of the Masai Mara. I told him I was surprised at his comment, and he told me he was surprised that I was surprised!
The bottom line, however, is Kenya's photography is still fantastic and we'll be going back next year and in 2018, too. The following is the trip report -- telling it exactly as it is.
Day 1. Nairobi to Samburu
We left Nairobi at 8:26 on the day of the famous Kenya Marathon, where many of the streets were closed for the racers and requiring us to do a circuitous route out of the city. We passed hundreds of white-shirted runners, joggers, and walkers along the way, a hopeless mass of racers if you were not in the top tier and aspired to place well. At one U-turn the race area was strewn with discarded plastic bottles from runners drinking and tossing the bottle aside.
While the drive to Samburu was once notoriously bad, with ruts in the road deep enough to swallow vehicles, the Chinese have constructed a road that extends north to Kenya’s border and is finally, for Kenya, a first class road. At Isiolo, once a frontier outpost, an international airport has been constructed, and with it, we fear, development will only increase, and eventually isolate Samburu just as Nairobi National Park is now a mere island in a sea of agriculture, industry, and housing.
Heavy woven bags of charcoal lined the highway out of Isiolo, white exclamation marks punctuating a landscape now denuded of the acacia trees cut to make this fuel. The land, grazed to the bone by sheep and goats, resembled a parking lot more than any wild area, with only scattered shrubs and, in patches, some ground cover that I presume was inedible.
At Archer’s Gate, the turn-off for us to reach Samburu Game Reserve and our wonderful lodge, Elephant Bedroom, a tented camp of only 12 tents, the Usaso Nyiro River was flowing, a surprising sight considering the drought the entire area had been having. Roadside pools marked a recent rain, and to our east verga and black storm clouds promised more, very needed rain, to come. The drive in to the gate at Samburu passes through Samburu villages and was littered with plastic trash, lining the road and the surrounding grounds almost like snow. Tanzania, like Rwanda, has now instituted a national clean-up day each month, and I hope Kenya eventually does so as well.
Fortunately, as we neared the entrance the trash dwindled to nothing. I was pleasantly surprised that the old, fourth-world pit toilets that were the only facilities at this entrance has been replaced with a tiled bathroom, with a flush toilet that works and with toilet paper supplied. While this seems silly to mention, it was a vast improvement from the past, and what is now standard fair in the Serengeti. It seems like Samburu’s management gets it.
Cattle grazing far inside the eastern section of Samburu Game Reserve. Last year this was potentially excusable, as there was a drought. This year the rains came, and if it was not for severe over-grazing, there would be grass outside the wildlife reserve.
We arrived at camp shortly after 5, met by our old friends, the camp manager Joseh, a great chef, David, and the various Samburu staff. Before dinner, Mary and I sat on our veranda and looked out over the river, entertaining ourselves by trying to figure out where the ants were carrying the bits of popcorn we had dropped. The white flakes, moving at random and sometimes colliding, reminding me of a Rosebowl Parade gone mad, as two dozen or more ants joined together to move the flake in one direction or another. Insect-eating bats swooped around us, catching insects we couldn’t see, and expending energy that just didn’t seem possible to replenish with the tiny bugs they might capture. It was good to be back!
Day 2. Samburu
Dawn broke with a cloudless sky, the sun a too-hot-to-watch orange ball over the river, framed by palms. We headed upriver, driving through surprisingly barren countryside. We passed a few Gerenuk early, small, scattered herds of Grants Gazelles, and a small herd of Impala. The area did not look over-grazed by cattle and goats as it had the year before, but cow dung and tracks did show evidence that the herds were here. Perhaps at night?
We had Lion tracks right outside of camp, and during the night the Olive Baboons created a loud ruckus, screaming and barking alarm calls, which may have been generated by the Lions or perhaps a passing leopard. Lion tracks were common, and I wondered if they were far-ranging because of a lack of food.
Day 4. Samburu
PM. Although the cloud cover appeared somewhat ominous, I bet that it would not rain, and it didn’t, at least not until after sunset when we were finishing up a Sundowner the camp gave us as a thank you for our long-term visits here. As we started our game drive the Isiolo and Buffalo Springs Reserve area were covered in heavy clouds and a wall of gray-black rain, jazzed up a bit by a horizontal rainbow that appeared when the western sky cleared. We headed to the mountain rocks looking for the leopard, and were very disappointed to see three different herds of cows soon after we left our lodge and reached the main road. These were the first cows we’d seen, unlike last year when there seemed to be herds everywhere, but it was still sad to see as it could herald the demise of Samburu, one of our favorite parks.
Day 6. Nakuru
The sky was clear at dawn. We had a cooked breakfast and then a three hour game drive, leaving our luggage in the rooms until we returned to the lodge to pack and to continue on to the Mara. Our first impression of the lake’s high water was correct – I don’t think we’ve ever seen it so high. A tiny scattering of pink Lesser Flamingos clustered on one shoreline; another, longer line of Greater Flamingos stretched out across the lake; and white patches of Pelicans marked a few spots on the shoreline. The Yellow –barked Acacia trees closest to the waterline, an area once hundreds of yards from water, are now dead. One of the crossroads towards a one-time favorite spot for flamingos is now flooded, with the sign marking the intersection an easy 100 yards or further from the nearest land. Large tracks of acacia forest, extending for hundreds of yards, is dead, and I suspect the water table and ground water is so high and saturated that the roots of acacias are slowly dying.
We addressed this last year, in the trip report, and I suspect that this condition had happened in the past, otherwise the acacia forest would be all across the crater floor. However, the last time this happened may have been hundreds of years ago, and the recovery of this forest, and those trees lining the shoreline, may take scores of years to come back. In my lifetime I doubt if I’ll see it, and it will also be interesting to see how much higher the lake fills.
No one has a reason for the change. Is it from deforestation, where rainfall in the mountains, that should be soaked up by the trees and roots, simply drains downhill, filling rivers, streams, and eventually this lake? Is the geology changing, and a plate shifting and lifting, tilting or sloshing the water table? I haven’t heard answers.
Day 7. Lower Mara
PM. The Lower Mara is dead. I hate to say it but I believe it is true. Just south of the Mara, in the northern Serengeti where cows are excluded the land and the wildlife is as it was in the Mara ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Two years ago, from our base here at Mara Sarova, we had a large pride of lions with nine cubs, several lionesses, and a big male or two. Last year, they were gone. It was possible, but unlikely, that we had missed them, but this year there is once again no trace.
Today we saw two Jackals, a dozen Elephants or so, and, tonight, one Lioness, although we were told that two others were in a lugga. With the absence of lions I would expect Cheetahs to flourish, but to do so they need food, and the number of Thompson’s Gazelles are few and life would be tough for this cat. We saw none. The land itself does not appear to have changed, although there are vast areas that are dotted with cow manure and grazed clean, but that barrenness could be the same if a natural fire had occurred. What has changed is the game – its scarcity. We saw two young Hyenas on the way in yesterday, and one tonight as we drove back into camp, and heard the ‘who-ooping’ of another last night. We did not hear lions.
Further out to the west, around the Hammerkop area, the grass was longer and there is where we saw a Serval today, but also plenty of cow droppings. Considering the amount of area we covered today we should have seen lions, or at least heard from other drivers about prides. True, our guide did hear about a pride, but we couldn’t find it, and we wonder if the guide who told him was even telling the truth.
We saw one small cluster of vultures today, and none that were nesting. If dead cows are poisoned, then leopards, lions, hyenas, jackals, and vultures all may die, as all of these animals will eat carrion. The fact that we saw so little, or none, of these animals would seem to indicate that this is so. Last night, around 4:30AM, we heard the tinkling of cow bells as Maasai drove a herd or herds through the night, either to or from grazing areas. At least this was an improvement over last year, when we’d see herds both in the morning and the evening, as indeed we did yesterday as we drove in, with scattered herds inside the park and close to the entrance.
The net impression we have is that the game is gone. Small scattered groups of topi or gazelles, few elephants, and virtually no predators – the area covered by Mara Simba, Mara Sarova, Keekorok, Mara Sopa, and those unfortunate lodges and camps actually outside the park boundaries – they’re dead, and certainly in October are simply not worth visiting. Ironically, where we did our game drive today is within sight of where, three weeks ago, we did game drives in Tanzania where we saw leopards, lions, cheetahs, klipspringers, black rhinos … the same animals that even ten years ago we’d surely see here.
Twenty years ago, we sometimes had on the rare exceptional day five different species of cat in a morning game drive (lion, leopard, cheetah, wild cat, caracal, serval in some combination), and getting the Big Five (lion, leopard, black rhino, buffalo, elephant) was fairly common. Today we were lucky to scrounge up three – buffalo, some elephants, and a few lions.
What is the future? Well, if the land isn’t lost, as it has outside the park boundaries with fencing going up everywhere, then the wildlife can recover. Private reserves in Kenya that were cattle ranches fifteen years ago are now thriving wildlife parks. Lions and leopards have enormous reproductive potential – a lion can have two to six cubs every two years, and females can breed at four years of age or less. If the land survives, and Kenya somehow, somehow gets its act together, the Mara can come back. We think, however, that its only future lies in being fenced, and completely, utterly excluding cattle and goats and sheep from the park. And keeping the predators in, too, as when game is scarce, predators would leave the park to kill livestock to survive, and obviously suffer the consequences. Hyenas from far distant areas may, in their search for food, scavenge kills outside the park, and risk being poisoned. Vultures go anywhere, and are thus vulnerable.
As it stands now, Kenya’s tourist revenue is declining, and will continue to do so. Lodges and camps, however, are continually being built, over-stressing the infrastructure, usurping critical habitat that leopards and lions use for denning, and degrading the entire experience. Just miles south, in Tanzania, where the Serengeti’s boundary is, for the most part, respected, game thrives. And in southern Africa, the future looks even brighter.
As I write this I look forward with some hope that the Mara Triangle, where we’ll go tomorrow, will be like normal, as that area is policed and preserved and maintained in orders of magnitude greater than the lower Mara. I don’t expect to be disappointed with that visit, as I am here, and depressed as well.
Day 11. Lower Mara - Mara Triangle at the Mara Bridge
At the Mara Bridge, on the Mara Triangle side, I found a very disturbing scene at the Ranger check in station. Dozens of insect-eating Bats were lying about, dead or dying. I picked a live one up very carefully, checking for an identification, and I asked one of the Rangers what killed them. He said some disease, but Mary and I could clearly smell the INSECTICIDE that surely had been used, killing the bats in their roost. Looking up at the roof’s peak I saw Bats still squirming from openings, unhealthy looking and sick. Before we left, I spoke with the Rangers there, playing stupid about the cause. I told them it was too bad the bats are dying since one bat can eat 10,000 mosquitos in a night, and these bats would be a great control for Malaria and Yellow Fever. They didn’t seem to know this, and perhaps, hopefully, they’ll not kill the bats in the future. Hopefully, anyone reading this will also CC this to the Head Ranger/Warden of the Mara Triangle and report this slaughter. If scores of people did this, it might make a difference.
As I wrote in the introduction to these trip reports, my initial reaction in seeing Samburu and the lower Mara last year was negative, but as the photography shows, we still had extremely productive safaris. As everyone who knows says, Kenya still delivers, and Mary and I have to agree. However, conditions are changing and long term, if things don’t change, the Mara will not be what we now have. I’d urge anyone interested in wildlife and photography to go now – in 2018, with us – for tourist dollars are absolutely important for the preservation of this land, and for a photographer, that money would be very, very well spent.
Trip Report:
Kenya
Photo Safari
Concerns about Management
2016
I made some other notes while doing my trip report that I've omitted from the official trip report. These were editorial in nature in many ways, and honestly were somewhat depressing at times as the notes addressed the state of the Masai Mara and Samburu and the number of cows entering those areas. Estimates vary, but I've heard that as many as 200,000 cows enter the Masai Mara every night, although the more commonly cited number is half that, at 100,000. The repercussions of this are huge, as I discuss.
I omitted these notes so as to not taint what was actually a very productive photo trip. I have to admit, I really thought this would be my last big safari to Kenya. It will NOT be, let me make that clear before I go any further. Overall, the shooting was spectacular, and the area where we were disappointed we're simply eliminating from our safari next year. If you've read my report from last year you know that I was very disappointed, as cattle and sheep and goats were invading both Samburu and the Masai Mara. Last year, we could not find a 20 odd Lion pride near the southeastern area of the Mara where we had the cats in previous years. That absence was not a fluke. Those Lions are gone, as was most of the game from the southeastern section of the Mara, an area served by the beautiful Mara Sarova lodge, Mara Sopa, Mara Simba, and Keekorok. Keekorok is 'right on the edge,' and a good friend of mine had great shooting in that area so that area may not be dead, yet.
However, the Mara Triangle and Upper-Middle Masai Mara were quite good, and so much so that next year I'm squeezing in a private safari with two good friends to photograph in Samburu and these two areas of the Masai Mara. And that's saying something, as that trip will take up nearly all of my 'open' time between mid-July until the end of December.
So despite my misgivings from last year, Kenya is still a great shoot. In fact, on our last safari, the mini-Mara photo safari in late November, one of the participants said this was the best shooting he's had in Africa. He had photographed in Botswana, which has a stellar reputation, but he felt the thick brush and trees there made game-viewing and photography far more difficult than it is in the wide open grasslands of the Masai Mara. I told him I was surprised at his comment, and he told me he was surprised that I was surprised!
The bottom line, however, is Kenya's photography is still fantastic and we'll be going back next year and in 2018, too. The following is the trip report -- telling it exactly as it is.
Day 1. Nairobi to Samburu
We left Nairobi at 8:26 on the day of the famous Kenya Marathon, where many of the streets were closed for the racers and requiring us to do a circuitous route out of the city. We passed hundreds of white-shirted runners, joggers, and walkers along the way, a hopeless mass of racers if you were not in the top tier and aspired to place well. At one U-turn the race area was strewn with discarded plastic bottles from runners drinking and tossing the bottle aside.
While the drive to Samburu was once notoriously bad, with ruts in the road deep enough to swallow vehicles, the Chinese have constructed a road that extends north to Kenya’s border and is finally, for Kenya, a first class road. At Isiolo, once a frontier outpost, an international airport has been constructed, and with it, we fear, development will only increase, and eventually isolate Samburu just as Nairobi National Park is now a mere island in a sea of agriculture, industry, and housing.
Heavy woven bags of charcoal lined the highway out of Isiolo, white exclamation marks punctuating a landscape now denuded of the acacia trees cut to make this fuel. The land, grazed to the bone by sheep and goats, resembled a parking lot more than any wild area, with only scattered shrubs and, in patches, some ground cover that I presume was inedible.
At Archer’s Gate, the turn-off for us to reach Samburu Game Reserve and our wonderful lodge, Elephant Bedroom, a tented camp of only 12 tents, the Usaso Nyiro River was flowing, a surprising sight considering the drought the entire area had been having. Roadside pools marked a recent rain, and to our east verga and black storm clouds promised more, very needed rain, to come. The drive in to the gate at Samburu passes through Samburu villages and was littered with plastic trash, lining the road and the surrounding grounds almost like snow. Tanzania, like Rwanda, has now instituted a national clean-up day each month, and I hope Kenya eventually does so as well.
Fortunately, as we neared the entrance the trash dwindled to nothing. I was pleasantly surprised that the old, fourth-world pit toilets that were the only facilities at this entrance has been replaced with a tiled bathroom, with a flush toilet that works and with toilet paper supplied. While this seems silly to mention, it was a vast improvement from the past, and what is now standard fair in the Serengeti. It seems like Samburu’s management gets it.
Cattle grazing far inside the eastern section of Samburu Game Reserve. Last year this was potentially excusable, as there was a drought. This year the rains came, and if it was not for severe over-grazing, there would be grass outside the wildlife reserve.
We arrived at camp shortly after 5, met by our old friends, the camp manager Joseh, a great chef, David, and the various Samburu staff. Before dinner, Mary and I sat on our veranda and looked out over the river, entertaining ourselves by trying to figure out where the ants were carrying the bits of popcorn we had dropped. The white flakes, moving at random and sometimes colliding, reminding me of a Rosebowl Parade gone mad, as two dozen or more ants joined together to move the flake in one direction or another. Insect-eating bats swooped around us, catching insects we couldn’t see, and expending energy that just didn’t seem possible to replenish with the tiny bugs they might capture. It was good to be back!
Day 2. Samburu
Dawn broke with a cloudless sky, the sun a too-hot-to-watch orange ball over the river, framed by palms. We headed upriver, driving through surprisingly barren countryside. We passed a few Gerenuk early, small, scattered herds of Grants Gazelles, and a small herd of Impala. The area did not look over-grazed by cattle and goats as it had the year before, but cow dung and tracks did show evidence that the herds were here. Perhaps at night?
We had Lion tracks right outside of camp, and during the night the Olive Baboons created a loud ruckus, screaming and barking alarm calls, which may have been generated by the Lions or perhaps a passing leopard. Lion tracks were common, and I wondered if they were far-ranging because of a lack of food.
Day 4. Samburu
PM. Although the cloud cover appeared somewhat ominous, I bet that it would not rain, and it didn’t, at least not until after sunset when we were finishing up a Sundowner the camp gave us as a thank you for our long-term visits here. As we started our game drive the Isiolo and Buffalo Springs Reserve area were covered in heavy clouds and a wall of gray-black rain, jazzed up a bit by a horizontal rainbow that appeared when the western sky cleared. We headed to the mountain rocks looking for the leopard, and were very disappointed to see three different herds of cows soon after we left our lodge and reached the main road. These were the first cows we’d seen, unlike last year when there seemed to be herds everywhere, but it was still sad to see as it could herald the demise of Samburu, one of our favorite parks.
Day 6. Nakuru
The sky was clear at dawn. We had a cooked breakfast and then a three hour game drive, leaving our luggage in the rooms until we returned to the lodge to pack and to continue on to the Mara. Our first impression of the lake’s high water was correct – I don’t think we’ve ever seen it so high. A tiny scattering of pink Lesser Flamingos clustered on one shoreline; another, longer line of Greater Flamingos stretched out across the lake; and white patches of Pelicans marked a few spots on the shoreline. The Yellow –barked Acacia trees closest to the waterline, an area once hundreds of yards from water, are now dead. One of the crossroads towards a one-time favorite spot for flamingos is now flooded, with the sign marking the intersection an easy 100 yards or further from the nearest land. Large tracks of acacia forest, extending for hundreds of yards, is dead, and I suspect the water table and ground water is so high and saturated that the roots of acacias are slowly dying.
We addressed this last year, in the trip report, and I suspect that this condition had happened in the past, otherwise the acacia forest would be all across the crater floor. However, the last time this happened may have been hundreds of years ago, and the recovery of this forest, and those trees lining the shoreline, may take scores of years to come back. In my lifetime I doubt if I’ll see it, and it will also be interesting to see how much higher the lake fills.
No one has a reason for the change. Is it from deforestation, where rainfall in the mountains, that should be soaked up by the trees and roots, simply drains downhill, filling rivers, streams, and eventually this lake? Is the geology changing, and a plate shifting and lifting, tilting or sloshing the water table? I haven’t heard answers.
Day 7. Lower Mara
PM. The Lower Mara is dead. I hate to say it but I believe it is true. Just south of the Mara, in the northern Serengeti where cows are excluded the land and the wildlife is as it was in the Mara ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Two years ago, from our base here at Mara Sarova, we had a large pride of lions with nine cubs, several lionesses, and a big male or two. Last year, they were gone. It was possible, but unlikely, that we had missed them, but this year there is once again no trace.
Today we saw two Jackals, a dozen Elephants or so, and, tonight, one Lioness, although we were told that two others were in a lugga. With the absence of lions I would expect Cheetahs to flourish, but to do so they need food, and the number of Thompson’s Gazelles are few and life would be tough for this cat. We saw none. The land itself does not appear to have changed, although there are vast areas that are dotted with cow manure and grazed clean, but that barrenness could be the same if a natural fire had occurred. What has changed is the game – its scarcity. We saw two young Hyenas on the way in yesterday, and one tonight as we drove back into camp, and heard the ‘who-ooping’ of another last night. We did not hear lions.
Further out to the west, around the Hammerkop area, the grass was longer and there is where we saw a Serval today, but also plenty of cow droppings. Considering the amount of area we covered today we should have seen lions, or at least heard from other drivers about prides. True, our guide did hear about a pride, but we couldn’t find it, and we wonder if the guide who told him was even telling the truth.
We saw one small cluster of vultures today, and none that were nesting. If dead cows are poisoned, then leopards, lions, hyenas, jackals, and vultures all may die, as all of these animals will eat carrion. The fact that we saw so little, or none, of these animals would seem to indicate that this is so. Last night, around 4:30AM, we heard the tinkling of cow bells as Maasai drove a herd or herds through the night, either to or from grazing areas. At least this was an improvement over last year, when we’d see herds both in the morning and the evening, as indeed we did yesterday as we drove in, with scattered herds inside the park and close to the entrance.
The net impression we have is that the game is gone. Small scattered groups of topi or gazelles, few elephants, and virtually no predators – the area covered by Mara Simba, Mara Sarova, Keekorok, Mara Sopa, and those unfortunate lodges and camps actually outside the park boundaries – they’re dead, and certainly in October are simply not worth visiting. Ironically, where we did our game drive today is within sight of where, three weeks ago, we did game drives in Tanzania where we saw leopards, lions, cheetahs, klipspringers, black rhinos … the same animals that even ten years ago we’d surely see here.
Twenty years ago, we sometimes had on the rare exceptional day five different species of cat in a morning game drive (lion, leopard, cheetah, wild cat, caracal, serval in some combination), and getting the Big Five (lion, leopard, black rhino, buffalo, elephant) was fairly common. Today we were lucky to scrounge up three – buffalo, some elephants, and a few lions.
What is the future? Well, if the land isn’t lost, as it has outside the park boundaries with fencing going up everywhere, then the wildlife can recover. Private reserves in Kenya that were cattle ranches fifteen years ago are now thriving wildlife parks. Lions and leopards have enormous reproductive potential – a lion can have two to six cubs every two years, and females can breed at four years of age or less. If the land survives, and Kenya somehow, somehow gets its act together, the Mara can come back. We think, however, that its only future lies in being fenced, and completely, utterly excluding cattle and goats and sheep from the park. And keeping the predators in, too, as when game is scarce, predators would leave the park to kill livestock to survive, and obviously suffer the consequences. Hyenas from far distant areas may, in their search for food, scavenge kills outside the park, and risk being poisoned. Vultures go anywhere, and are thus vulnerable.
As it stands now, Kenya’s tourist revenue is declining, and will continue to do so. Lodges and camps, however, are continually being built, over-stressing the infrastructure, usurping critical habitat that leopards and lions use for denning, and degrading the entire experience. Just miles south, in Tanzania, where the Serengeti’s boundary is, for the most part, respected, game thrives. And in southern Africa, the future looks even brighter.
As I write this I look forward with some hope that the Mara Triangle, where we’ll go tomorrow, will be like normal, as that area is policed and preserved and maintained in orders of magnitude greater than the lower Mara. I don’t expect to be disappointed with that visit, as I am here, and depressed as well.
Day 11. Lower Mara - Mara Triangle at the Mara Bridge
At the Mara Bridge, on the Mara Triangle side, I found a very disturbing scene at the Ranger check in station. Dozens of insect-eating Bats were lying about, dead or dying. I picked a live one up very carefully, checking for an identification, and I asked one of the Rangers what killed them. He said some disease, but Mary and I could clearly smell the INSECTICIDE that surely had been used, killing the bats in their roost. Looking up at the roof’s peak I saw Bats still squirming from openings, unhealthy looking and sick. Before we left, I spoke with the Rangers there, playing stupid about the cause. I told them it was too bad the bats are dying since one bat can eat 10,000 mosquitos in a night, and these bats would be a great control for Malaria and Yellow Fever. They didn’t seem to know this, and perhaps, hopefully, they’ll not kill the bats in the future. Hopefully, anyone reading this will also CC this to the Head Ranger/Warden of the Mara Triangle and report this slaughter. If scores of people did this, it might make a difference.
As I wrote in the introduction to these trip reports, my initial reaction in seeing Samburu and the lower Mara last year was negative, but as the photography shows, we still had extremely productive safaris. As everyone who knows says, Kenya still delivers, and Mary and I have to agree. However, conditions are changing and long term, if things don’t change, the Mara will not be what we now have. I’d urge anyone interested in wildlife and photography to go now – in 2018, with us – for tourist dollars are absolutely important for the preservation of this land, and for a photographer, that money would be very, very well spent.
