#field-guide

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Meet Mark - a living legend

A white-haired gentleman - legend of a guide - born in the US, but came to Kenya around age 30 and spent over 40 years guiding and travelling East-Africa. We are quite privileged to have him instructing us, usually he will be guiding top-end customers flying them from one premium lodge to the next in his own airplane.

He is a friendly guy, great storyteller, extremely knowledgeable and aware. He has an unbelievable ability to interpret - and often predict - animal behavior giving him a type of beast-master aura. He can also do most animal sounds and has some vivid conversations with lion males and elephants. Despite his fascination with animals we discover that his core addiction is to adventure: He is thrill-seeking to a level that cannot be exaggerated. The most surprising part is that despite going all the way and beyond, every time - he is still alive!

The things that he survived would be enough to kill an entire army of people. Some of the episodes he casually dropped:

-he was kidnapped in Uganda by a group of seperatist terrorists who murdered half his guests, but let him and a few others go

-he was fly-fishing in a river when he was suddenly mauled full-on into the back by an angry old buffalo bull - only reason he survived is the buffalo threw him into a bush and then couldn’t see him anymore

-he saved a client frozen in shock from a charging herd of elephants by throwing sand in their eyes and hiding behind a rock below the edge of a cliff

-while kneeling to examine a track he was jumped on and attacked by a leopard

-When recently (!) jumping out of an airplane skydiving, he ended up hitting a second plane with his head, falling unconsciously through the sky. His parachute opened automatically, he landed on a coral reef which saved him from drowning and then got brought to hospital by a gentleman who just saw him fall when jetskiing in the area with his son. Yeah, he was in a coma and had to relearn every single movement of his body - but he made it.

Despite all this, he still sky- and scuba-dives, goes for a run in dangerous game areas...and does aerobatics in his sports plane. It’s oddly fascinating: this risk-taking behavior and surviving it. On the one hand it makes you think he is reckless and crazy and you should stay the hell away from him, on the other it tempts you to join him, because deep down you know this guy is a magic survivor and you’ll be fine.

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Enonkishu - a model for conservation?

Enonkishu is a special place. It is not part of the Mara NP, but is a private conservancy on the border of the Mara. The whole area was used as farmland, both for crops and cattle. The very building where we receive our classes on nature guiding used to be a slaughter house for Mara beef. They would buy young cattle from other places, top them up with a good final graze of those delicious Mara grasses and sell them - now branded - at a premium.

When the whole operation tanked, a group of investors had this insane idea: to build a residential area in this zone. Now this is something really unusal as not residential building permits are issued in the Mara. But they did receive a licence under the condition that they would invest heavily into renaturalizing the place. So today you have these nice houses in a semi-fenced area, with all sorts of game around it...a Maasai population and… cattle grazing. Miraculously this all fits together quite well.

The Maasai drive through the area on motorbikes or even walk on the road (by day!) without being torn to bits. The cattle is protected from predators by being placed in bomas (fenced areas) at night which are - and this is critical - mobile.

It turns out that by moving the cattle around the area their net effect on the grass is actually positive. They will graze a bit and leave such miraculous dung, you actually see the contours of where the boma was as a flourishing circle of green much later. This was a big eye opener for me, as previously I believed the only way to conserve wildlife and wild areas was to remove all humans and livestock from this place and “leave the wilderness alone”. This strategy of course causes all sorts of ethical dilemmas between the rights of wild animals for a habitat and different groups of people (e.g. cattle owners, farmers, tourism operators). But it makes sense when you think about it: The Maasai have been herding cattle moving around this area for hundreds if not thousands of years.

An additional deterrent for predators the Maasai use are flickering lights. This legend, a local kid, wired some random electronics together and came up with a system of lights flashing at night that predators interpret to be humans patrolling with a torch. Contrary to laymen’s opinion lions do not actively seek awake groups of humans to go and eat them, but usually widely avoid them. Genius.

The conservancy is owned by the Maasai and tourism operators as well as our training provider pay significant conservancy fees available to benefit the community. This way healthy wildlife is not just a nice-to-have, but an essential driver of economic welfare. The idea was to reach an agreement to merge Enonkishu with the 2 neighboring conservancies Ochorro and Lemek for more efficient management - the fences are already down.

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The Maasai Mara

The Mara is a very special place. The name derives from the Maasai tribe itself and the word “Mara” meaning “spotted”. Single beautiful balanites trees spot the wide open grass planes, that are layered like terraces at an altitude of 2,000m above sea level (which is why it’s not always as frickin hot as the rest of Kenya).

The planes are just West and South of the Great rift valley in Kenya’s South-West. Together with the vast lands across the Tanzanian border, they form the Serengeti-Mara system, home to the world’s great migration of more than 2 million animals: Mainly wildebeest, zebra and thomson gazelle. They move in a circular pattern following the rains causing the grasses to flourish.

This excellent grazing grass feeds a huge population of herbivores that in turn support all your camera’s darling predators: be it your lions, leopards and cheetahs, hyenas or wild dogs, jackals, crocs or birds of prey. This density and variety of animals coupled with the openness of the terrain makes for extremely rewarding game viewing. In fact it inflates your expectations to a degree that few other national parks in the world will be able to deliver.

This fantastic visibility often provides you with the luxury of choice: We would drive up along the escarpment and scan the horizon with our binoculars. I see a tower of giraffes on the right, a breeding herd of elephants 2 planes down and a massive bird of prey sitting on a dead tree to left. Where shall we go first? And as we are not in the Maasai Mara National Park, but in a private conservancy, we have a massive additional privilege: We are allowed to take the vehicles offroad! This can mean following routes through the grass or - when tracking lions for instance - driving into the bush. Of course being slow and making sure you don’t run over any poor creature. But this compared to the frustration of being glued to the tar road while the sighting of your lifetime may be but 10 meters away...is gold.

The frequency of predator sightings helps you to quickly get into the guide’s modus operandi. We wouldn’t just see a lion...we would see different prides, we would see how different a male acts (doesn’t give a flying f***) from the females (defensive) or the cubs (very curious), we would see them meeting, sleeping, feeding, hunting, bonding and mating.

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Royal Tenenbaums Motif

{does is get any better than an orange external frame backpack, a field guide to North American Birds and a pale yellow Schwinn with Squash goggles?}

HDHedges