Insight Guides Kenya by Insight Guides

Author:Insight Guides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Kenya
Publisher: APA
Published: 2019-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

The Maasai Mara has enjoyed a reputation for superb wildlife game viewing since the early colonial era, when it was a popular destination for hunting safaris out of Nairobi. Although the Maasai who traditionally inhabit the area are natural conservationists, who seldom hunt for the pot, the first formal conservation efforts date to 1948, when the 520 sq km (190 sq mile) Mara Wildlife Sanctuary was founded to protect the westerly part of the modern reserve known as the Mara Triangle. In 1961, the reserve was extended to cover 1,820 sq km (655 sq miles) and management was ceded to Narok County Council (NCC), which handed back parts of the reserve to local communities in the mid-1970s, leaving it at its present size. In 1995, following a national reorganisation of counties, control was split between the NCC and the newly formed TransMara County Council (TMCC), with the southwesterly Mara Triangle falling under the latter authority. As a result, separate park fees must now be paid to visit the part of the reserves east and west of the Mara River, a circumstance that generally discourages visitors staying on one side of the river to cross to the other on game drives.

The Great Migration

In terms of statistics, Barnum & Bailey were never close to the show provided by the Serengeti-Mara’s wildebeest migration: a company of over 2 million animals, an arena 3,200km (2,000 miles) round, and a non-stop year-long spectacle that has followed a similar pattern for hundreds of thousands of years. At the last count, there were 1.7 million wildebeests in the main cavalcade, accompanied by hundreds of thousands of gazelles, zebras, hartebeest and 64,000 other grazers and browsers.

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