Maasai Mara National Park

Maasai Mara National Park In Kenya, Kenya’s Wildebeest Migration Tour Destination

Maasai Mara national park in Kenya, Kenya’s wildebeest migration tour destination, world-renowned for its exceptional populations of the Big Five and wildlife, where Maasai culture and fashion catches the eye a breathtaking climate and geography.

Maasai Mara also known as Masaai Mara, and locally simply as The Mara, is a large game reserve in Narok County, Kenya, contiguous with the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. It is named in honor of the Maasai people, the ancestral inhabitants of the area. Their description of the area when looked at from afar: “Mara” means “spotted” in the local Maasai language, due to the many trees which dot the landscape.

Apart from wildlife, the landscapes of the Maasai Mara are stunningly beautiful: the classic Out of Africa backdrops of seemingly never-ending savanna studded with photogenic acacia trees. To the west, the park is bordered by the Oloololo Escarpment, a dramatic plateau, while the rest of the park is made up of rolling grasslands, acacia woodlands, riverine forest and rocky hills.

Two major rivers – the Talek and the Mara – cut through the Maasai Mara National Reserve, splitting it into three sectors: the Sekenani Sector, which lies to the east of the Talek River, the Musiara Sector, which is sandwiched between the two rivers, and the Mara Triangle, which is west of the Mara River. The Musiara and Sekenani Sectors are controlled by the Narok County Council, while the more remote Mara Triangle is administered by a non-profit conservancy company, the Trans Mara County Council.

Musiara Sector offers great game viewing in the Musiara Marsh, as well as some of the most spectacular wildebeest crossings at the Mara River. In the southeast of the park and bordered by the Sand, Talek and Mara Rivers, the Central Plains makes up the largest part of the reserve. The expansive grasslands of the Central Plains attract vast herds of plains animals, especially during the Great Migration from August to October, while the area is also famed for exciting big cat sightings.

Within the Central Plains, the savanna of Paradise Plain is prime cheetah territory, while Rhino Ridge for black-backed jackals, spotted hyena and bat-eared foxes. Head to Lookout Hill for incredible panoramas of the Olpunyaia Swamp and sightings of hippo, as well as for scenes of wildebeest crossing the river during the months of the migration. As the closest area to Nairobi and with a huge number of lodges, hotels and camps, the Central Plains is the most popular area of the reserve for tourists.

The Maasai Mara’s rivers are home to hippos and massive Nile crocodiles, as well as many species of water birds, while the Mara River, which wends its way through the national reserve, plays host to the biggest pods of hippos and also to the perilous crossings of wildebeest during the Great Migration.

Wildebeest Migration

The great wildebeest migration is one of the most phenomenal natural spectacles in the world. It is an annual movement by millions of wildebeest, accompanied by large numbers of zebra, Grant’s gazelle, Thompson’s gazelle, elands and impalas across the greater Maasai Mara-Serengeti ecosystem.

Every year more than 2 million animals (wildebeest, zebra, and gazelle) migrate in a clockwise direction across the ecosystems of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and the Maasai Mara National Park in Kenya. The annual migration northwest, at the end of the rainy season (usually in May or June) is recognized as one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World.

Wildebeest often graze in mixed herds with zebra, which gives heightened awareness of potential predators. They are also alert to the warning signals emitted by other animals such as baboons. Wildebeest are a tourist attraction but compete with domesticated livestock for pasture and are sometimes blamed by farmers for transferring diseases and parasites to their cattle. Some illegal hunting goes on but the population trend is fairly stable and some populations are in national parks or on private land.