11 February, 2011
08 February, 2011
News from the Wild: Masai Mara
Overview
The Mara is green and full of wild flowers of different colors that have blossomed after the short rains. The grass is getting taller, but one can still see the smaller animals.
The plains game is spread all over especially in areas where the grass is short and not swampy especially around Mara Intrepids Camp in areas like Intiakitiak, Double Crossing, the Topi Plain and Paradise Plain.
Big Cats Sightings
Lions
The good news is that the lion prides are building up after years of diminishing numbers in the prides. This year has seen so many cubs born from different prides with only a few losses.
The Ridge Pride, which is one of the largest pride has split into five smaller groups. There are 17 cubs, aged between three and five months. There are about ten adult lionesses and seven mature males. Two of these males are in charge of two separate families. One is at the Double Crossing and the other at Rhino Ridge. Junior’s mother, the lioness with a crooked back is in charge of the Rhino Ridge.
Notch and his four sons are also seen with the Olkeju-Ronkai Pride. However, four days ago they encountered cubs that were sired by different males. They killed the cubs and ate them up. In the wild, this is not uncommon. It is survival for the fittest.
Male lions also killed some cubs belonging to the Paradise Pride and another in the Mara Triangle.
The Olkiombo Pride of 19 lions is seen between Maji ya Fisi and Double Crossing with their three males - Cheza, Sala and Junior.
The Marsh Pride is still intact - Clawed and Romeo are still with the pride.
Leopards
Olive and her two cubs are seen around Olkiombo near Mara Intrepids Camp. The cubs - Shujaa, the male cub whose name is Kiswahili for brave and Jamhuri the female cub whose name means freedom - are three months old.
Pacha and Kayoni, the older cubs are still sharing the same territory with their mother, Olive. However, Pacha is more to the west of Mara Intrepids/Mara Explorer and Kayoni occupies the area west and east of Mara Intrepids/Mara Explorer along the Talek River.
The regularly hunt impala and warthog piglets.
Cheetah
Shingo’s six cubs are seen on the plains of Topi, Paradise and Olkiombo. They hunt hartebeests, topis and warthog piglets. Shingo has been spotted around Maji ya Fisi and Sarova.
Charming Lake Challa
A secret lake lies in a crater within site of Kilimanjaro’s towering snow-clad mountain, only we can’t see Africa’s tallest mountain because of the thick clouds.
Formed by explosive eruptions thousands of years ago, the crater-lake is fed by underground streams from the mighty mountain.
Its turquoise blue-green waters stand in stark contrast to the dry and dusty land where fat baobabs and thorny trees tough it out under a merciless sun.
Dust trails the cars driving out from Voyager Ziwani on the edge of Tsavo West national park to the secret crater-lake, driving past red-earth anthills, the shambas of the Taveta people and the turning to the hill where Grogan built his castle in 1930.
Nobody would guess what lies in the mound amidst this non-descript terrain until one reaches the rim and a burst of blue sparkles in the volcano’s crater. So secret is it that one could easily drive past it.
Even today few people visit it but historical records show that during the First World War, the allied forces marched around the northern edge in their advance on Taveta to battle it out with the Kaiser’s force.
Scrambling down the narrow path to reach the shores of the pretty pond that’s 4.5 square kilometres and 94 metres deep with the invisible line separating Kenya and Tanzania, we meet two women climbing up with fish bought from the local fishermen.
The women, are from the shores of Lake Victoria almost 800-kilometres away. On my first visit to the lake eight years ago, nobody dared swim in it for a teenage British girl, Amy Nicholls had been killed by a crocodile.
Her body was found on the Tanzanian side and brought to Nairobi for a post-mortem where it was revealed that the culprit was a croc. A local diving team spotted one a few years ago and a pair of tusks lying on the lake bed.
On closer look, the tusks were plastic used in a film shot on location. Little boys swim by a collapsed bridge which some enterprising person wanted to build to connect Kenya and Tanzania – secretly l think it would have spoiled the beauty of the stunning lake besides affecting the natural biodiversity.
Sitting on the shore of the lake, I weigh the odds of bumping into a croc. More unlikely than being hit by a car in Nairobi and none of the local guys have seen one in many, many years.
Floating on the water surrounded by the steep walls of the volcano and its forest of euphorbia and fig trees and a blue sky above, life’s a dream. A lone African fish eagle soars above to complete the idyllic picture.
Diving a few feet underwater shows the sun’s rays filter through clear water. But like everybody in the group questions, where did the crocodile come from when there is no surface river flowing into it.
Picture by ©Gurinder Sehmi
A little investigation solves the mystery. The Challa croc-culprit is no other than Grogan, one of Kenya’s most vivid colonial characters who besides building his enormous castle on the nearby hill, pioneered large-scale farming and irrigation in Taveta.
He in his wisdom, then brought some rare dwarf crocodiles as pets and had them shipped from Madagascar in the 1930s and put into Lake Challa, which lay in his 9,650-square-mile estate.
The crocs were thought to have become extinct in the lake some years ago, many killed by the local fishermen in the 1990s when the toothy reptile continually ruined their fishing nets. Maybe it was just the lone one lurking in 2002.
Article by Rupi Mangat, rupi.mangat@yahoo.com Reproduced Courtesy of Nation Newspapers. All rights Nation Media Group Ltd. As appeared on Saturday Magazine, 20th November 2010
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