Masai Mara
Interesting facts
- The Mara is the only protected area in Kenya whose black rhinos are an original native population, never topped up by animals moved in from elsewhere.
- Poaching in the 1970s and early 1980s cut the reserve's black rhino numbers to as few as about 15 animals, from which the population has slowly recovered.
- More than 500 bird species have been recorded here, almost 60 of them raptors, and BirdLife International lists the reserve as an Important Bird Area.
- Alongside some 1.3 million wildebeest, the great migration carries roughly 500,000 Thomson's gazelles, about 97,000 topi and around 18,000 eland.
- The reserve began in 1961 as a wildlife sanctuary of just 520 square kilometres, was enlarged the same year, and later trimmed to about 1,510 square kilometres.
- Its western edge is the Siria, or Oloololo, Escarpment, a wall of the East African Rift, a system of faults some 5,600 kilometres long.
- Rainfall rises steadily across the reserve, from about 800 millimetres a year in the east to around 1,200 millimetres in the west.
- The BBC series Big Cat Diary was filmed here, following individual lions, leopards and cheetahs around the Musiara marsh, Leopard Gorge and the Mara River.
- Monthly counts between 1989 and 2003 recorded steep declines in resident grazers, including about 75 percent of giraffes and 80 percent of warthogs.
- Fewer than ten lodges stood around the Mara in the late 1970s; by 2016 there were nearly 200.
Why it is worth it
The reserve's name comes from two different languages layered together. "Maasai" is how the people call themselves; "Mara," in the Maa language, means "spotted" — a description of how the grassland looks from a distance, dotted with the scattered, low trees (mostly Balanites aegyptiaca, the desert date, rather than true acacia) that break up the plain into a mottled pattern. Fly over it and the name still fits exactly.
What the Mara is actually known for is the river crossing, the single most dramatic act in the wider Serengeti–Mara migration. Between roughly July and October, well over a million wildebeest, along with hundreds of thousands of zebra and gazelle, funnel toward the Mara River and throw themselves into water thick with crocodiles, while lions, hyenas, and cheetahs work the banks on either side. It's not one clean event but a ragged, repeated gamble that plays out at various crossing points for weeks, with a smaller return crossing again in late October and November as the herds head back south into Tanzania.
The reserve is on Kenya's list of sites proposed for UNESCO recognition, but its ecological weight has never depended on that status — it's one half of an essentially unfenced ecosystem shared with the Serengeti across the border, where the animals move according to rain and grass rather than any line drawn on a map.
Best time to visit
July through October for the river crossings; the calving season in the southern Serengeti (roughly January–March) is the counterpart event, outside the Mara itself.
Getting there
63 km from Mugumu. Mara Serena Lodge Airstrip (MRE) is about 17 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Maasai Mara, sometimes also spelt Masai Mara and locally known simply as The Mara, is a large national game reserve in Narok County, Kenya, contiguous with the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. It is named in honour of the Maasai people, the ancestral inhabitants of the area, who migrated to the area from the Nile Basin. Their description of the area when looked at from afar: "Mara" means "spotted" in the Maa language because of the short bushy trees which dot the landscape.
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