Masai Mara

We made it down to Nairobi about a week ago, and after two nights getting our bearings and seeing some friends, we took another flight down to spend five days in the Masai Mara, which is a National Park in the south of Kenya that connects seamlessly into the Serengeti in Tanzania.  

Touching down in the Masai Mara - you're greeted with an airport that looks like this:

Not only is there no security check, it turns out you don't even need a ticket to fly back to Nairobi when your trip is done!  Our camp was a short drive from the air strip, and set in a big group of trees next to a river (it was called Mara Intrepids for those interested).

We stayed in a tent set right on the river, with a big deck overlooking the water where we could see crocodiles, hippos, monkeys, mongooses, monitor lizards (~2-3 feet long), genet cats, and TONS of birds, especially kingfishers, who were almost always fishing in the river.  Quite a bit to see without even leaving camp!  

Camp was patrolled fairly routinely by a big tribe of Vervet monkeys.  On our first day after we had moved in, they came by our tent all together to check out the newcomers.  While a few were hanging off the roof distracting us, one of them unzipped and ripped open the tent flaps, peeking his little head in to see if we had anything good inside!!  Here's one of the adults in the pack:

And here's the best shot we got of one of their babies (which were adorable, but pretty tough to photograph):

Pretty much immediately after we checked in, we headed out on a game drive in a 9-seater open air Land Rover, which was absolutely indestructible (we could drive across rivers, over huge rocks, pretty much go anywhere we wanted).  Game drives were our predominant activity during the rest of our days, and each drive we did was amazing & quite different.  It's hard to even know how to sum it up, so below we'll share a subset of our favorite pictures and a little bit of the story, etc. behind each.  We've tried to group it here to be a little more organized, so we'll cover 1) Big cats, 2) other iconic African species, 3) some of our favorite unsung heros / lesser knowns.

1)  The Big Cats:

There is something magical about being close to big predators in the wild & the leopards, lions, and cheetahs certainly fit the bill (not to mention the Servals and smaller cats we saw).  We had assumed big cats would be relatively scarce, but we saw >40 on our short trip - they were everywhere!  Unlike many of the smaller animals, they were not remotely troubled by the land rovers we drove around, and so we saw a lot of the most interesting behaviors from them: eating, keeping food away from scavengers, mating, grooming, etc.

Greg's favorite shot from the whole trip is of a mother cheetah feeding on a fresh wildebeest:​

It is certainly a bit gruesome, but it also shows a very caring and effective mother.  We saw this cheetah w/ kills on two separate days, both around the outskirts of the great migration herd.  Her three cubs would be jostling with each other for the best position to eat, but she would look up very frequently, scanning for hyenas and other scavengers who might come to take the kill. It's hard to tell from the photos, but cheetahs are actually not all that large, and are usually unable to defend their kills once they have been discovered, so they need to eat fast and stay alert so they are not ambushed.  The full scene looked like this:

And if you turned your head from that and looked in any other direction, you'd see the huge "great migration" herds of wildebeests, apparently untroubled by the cheetahs presence (at least while the cheetahs still had food in front of them):

Joann's favorite big cat from the trip was the leopard.  We only saw two leopards, but they were absolutely mesmerizing to watch up close.  Leopards are solitary and fairly shy, but also extremely strong and excellent hunters.  Here's a pic of the first leopard we came across on our first drive down there:

Quite striking!  Unlike cheetahs who have to eat quickly and watch out for scavengers while feeding, leopards solve this problem by first cleaning their carcasses (i.e. removing stomach, intestines, etc), and then literally hauling the whole animal to the top of a tree where most scavengers can't get it.  Here's what a typical leopard kill would look like (you would see these in trees when driving around, and you'd know a leopard was close, even if you couldn't see it):

And last but certainly not least in the "Big Cats" category is the lions.  We saw a TON of lions and they were very fun to watch.  The lions were by far the least skittish of any animal we saw (they know they are king!), so it was easy to get up close and watch them as long as you wanted.  It was hard to even pick which photos to share, but here are a few of our absolute favorites:

We also took quite a few videos of all of these animals.  The video files are huge and many we need to edit, so we'll try to figure out how to share that at some other point.  Here's one clip though that is fairly complete as is and didn't need editing.  In addition to feeding, the other activity we saw a lot from the lions was mating.  They pair off for a week at a time and mate something like 360 times to ensure conception, staying in largely the same spot and not eating, so they were pretty easy to find.  Here's the video we shot (sorry it's a little shaky... Greg is still trying to get the hang of the video functionality on our camera):

2) Other iconic species:  This is way too broad of a category, but below are some of our favorite shots of the other iconic, well-known african animal species we saw.  We expected to see most of these guys, and were definitely not disappointed!

3) Highlights from the lesser known species:  In addition to all the animals you hear about before you come, we were struck by just how many other very interesting animals we saw frequently down there.  We got pictures and positive IDs for something like 64 different species and we've only covered ~15 so far in this post.  #16-64 were just as cool, and we wish we had space here to share them all (and the internet bandwidth to upload them in a reasonable period of time :p).  In there interest of space, here are just a few of our other favorites:

Welp, that's it for now.  We fly to Lamu today on the coast of Kenya for a little beach time.  We'll try to post again soon, and may share more Masai Mara pics as well once we get them cleaned up and uploaded.  We'll leave you with this sunset pic from our last full day there.