Edition 39: Summer 2007

While undoubtedly still one of the world’s most spectacular places to view wildlife, the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem is clearly under threat from modern pressures. Here, Brian Jackman reflects on the transitions he’s witnessed over the past three decades and ponders how to protect the sweeping savannah’s glory for future generations.

Last November I realised a long-held ambition to visit the northwest corner of the Serengeti National Park. My safari companion was Paul Oliver, founder of Oliver’s Camp in Tarangire and one of Tanzania’s most respected professional guides.

Only a couple of years ago this was bandit country, infested with poachers and shunned by visitors. Now the park rangers are back in control and the tourists are moving in. Last year Paul Oliver set up a mobile camp at Wogakuria, a dramatic hilltop from which you can look north over the plains of the Lamai Wedge into Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve.

Paul’s camp, set in a tumbling chaos of kopjes, was breathtaking. Ancient fig trees cast deep pools of shade and animals were moving all around us. No wonder Myles Turner, the great Serengeti warden of the 1960s, loved this place above all others.

From here and Sayari, another idyllic camp nearby, we explored the pristine plains and secret valleys and hardly met another vehicle. What we did see were animals in numbers beyond counting. Not just the migrating wildebeest herds but elephant, buffalo, giraffe and eland, and prides of lion everywhere. And it suddenly struck me. This was how the Mara looked when I first saw it in 1974.

The Mara will always be a special place for me because this was where I saw and heard my first lion. Not close enough to feel the air vibrating, as I would in years to come, but loud enough to be hooked for life.

That lion belonged to the Musiara pride, a family I came to know well. For five years the photographer Jonathan Scott and I followed them and chronicled their lives in The Marsh Lions. Published in 1982, the book was an instant best seller, and the lions themselves would later become the feline superstars of the BBC’s hugely successful Big Cat Diary TV series.

Looking back, it seems those carefree days spent with the Marsh Lions belonged to a golden age. There were only half a dozen camps and lodges in the entire reserve (compared to 25 today), and, from Rhino Ridge all the way down to the Serengeti border, only the ruts of old tyre tracks or the hum of a light aircraft heading for Governors Camp airstrip indicated that the 20th century had ever come this far.

But in recent years the magical Mara has become too popular for its own good. Too many lodges, too many vehicles cutting deep ruts across the plains as they hunt in packs for the reserve’s legendary big cats.
Yet for all its problems, the Mara is still Kenya’s finest wildlife showcase. It is Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, hoisted 5000 ft into the sky along with its immense landscapes of acacias, cloud shadows and chest-high oat grass, its endless herds of migrating animals and nights that echo to the rumble of lions.

Leopards, so elusive when the fur trade was active, now pose in broad daylight beside the Talek River. Elephants are more plentiful than ever, and even the black rhino, helped by organisations such as Friends of Conservation, has returned from the dead.

Twenty-five years ago the Mara was still relatively unknown, its existence eclipsed by the fame of the adjoining Serengeti. But all that changed when Kenya and Tanzania fell out and closed the border in 1977. Until then, Nairobi had been the main tourist gateway for both countries. Now, denied direct access to the Serengeti, visitors turned increasingly towards the Mara.

In 1983 the border re-opened but the damage was done. The Mara was Africa’s rising star and even today the Bologonja Gate, the only crossing-point between the Mara and the Serengeti, remains closed to visitors.

In the early 1980s it was still possible to witness the zebra and wildebeest migration storming across the Mara River, without another vehicle in sight. But in the boom years that followed the 1985 box-office success of Out of Africa, the Mara began to creak at the seams. New lodges sprang up and not even the bad press surrounding occasional acts of banditry or the murder in 1988 of Julie Ward, a British tourist, deterred visitors, who now arrive at the rate of 300,000 a year.

Remorselessly, modern Africa and its unchecked population growth are closing in, and those who knew the Mara in its age of innocence can find it dispiriting. To cross the Mara River and enter the 110 square miles of the Mara Triangle on its west bank you must drive across a concrete drift. Nearby, a shanty town has sprung up, a place called Mara Rianta, amid a desolation of shattered tree stumps – all that remains of a section of savannah forest where Jonathan Scott and I used to search for leopards 20 years ago.

Luckily, things are different on the other side of the river. In 2001 the Mara Triangle became Kenya’s first privately run game reserve when the Mara Conservancy, a non-profit consortium, took over from the local county council. Overnight, roads were repaired after years of neglect, poachers arrested and years of corruption consigned to history.

Fully to understand the Mara, it is important to remember that although much of it is a national reserve, the land belongs to the Maasai, whose livestock have traditionally co-existed with the migratory plains game. Even so, encroachment is a growing problem.

More disturbing to me, the Maasai are moving out of their dung-plastered huts into tin-roofed houses, swapping their red shukas for city suits and sending their kids to school to become doctors and business executives. Nothing wrong with that, you might say, but as the group ranches surrounding the protected reserve are sub-divided and sold off to outsiders, it is not only the unfenced nature of the Mara’s plains that is disappearing but the Maasai and their entire semi-nomadic lifestyle.

Already the amount of unfenced land available outside the reserve for the migrating herds has shrunk, a fact reflected in the fast-declining numbers of herbivores making the journey north from Tanzania. In the 1980s, 800,000 of the Serengeti’s 1.3 million wildebeest marched north to the Mara every year. Although still incredibly impressive to observe, today’s migrations include only half that number.

Ron Beaton, who established the highly acclaimed Rekero Safari Camp on the Talek River, has been trying to buck the trend by setting up a guide school on the Koiyaki Group Ranch, a 250,000-acre wilderness just outside the reserve’s northern rim. Beaton’s aim is to help Maasai students become safari guides and save the area for eco-tourism.

Men like Beaton and Jackson ole Looseyia, his Maasai business partner, have played a vital part in maintaining the integrity of the Mara as a wildlife stronghold underpinned by eco-tourism. Others include Aris Grammaticus, the veteran owner of Governors Camp, who has been there since the beginning, and Calvin Cottar, a fourth-generation safari guide who runs a 1920s-style camp on the eastern edge of the reserve. Although the Mara is still probably the richest slice of wildlife real estate in Africa, without people like these it would be a less exciting place to visit.

Earlier this year, in an attempt to curb visitor numbers and help preserve the Mara’s threatened ecosystem, the Kenya Tourist Board proposed a doubling of park fees. And there is no doubt that something needs to be done. At present, during the peak season when the migration is in full swing, more than 8000 visitors can be in the reserve at the same time. But hanging a ‘house full’ sign on the Mara takes courage, especially in Africa where every tourist dollar counts.

Meanwhile, the Serengeti has also had its problems. In 1966, when the American biologist George Schaller began his famous Lion Study Project, there were about 3000 lions in the park, but between 1993 and 1995 an outbreak of canine distemper rampaged through the entire ecosystem, killing 1000 lions as well as wild dogs and other carnivores. The lion population has bounced back, but the dogs are now scarcer than ever.

Worse still was the tragedy of the Serengeti elephants. By the early 1980s unchecked ivory poaching had driven most of the survivors to seek sanctuary in the Mara, leaving only a few shell-shocked groups like those I once saw far out in the open grasslands near Naabi Hill. Today, it’s a different story. Following the ivory trade ban in 1989 the elephants recovered and are now commonly seen all over the park.

In the Serengeti, size matters. It’s the one big advantage it has over the Mara, for visitors and wildlife alike. The Serengeti is four times the size of the Mara, and despite its fame it has only nine lodges and a small handful of seasonal camps. Nobody who comes here can fail to be overwhelmed by the feeling of freedom that comes with its endless horizons; and as for the animals, the park’s vast reservoirs of space are their salvation.

Even so, the park has seen big changes. When I first knew the Serengeti, Hugo van Lawick was filming wild dogs and cheetahs and together we could drive at will around the Gol Kopjes, looking for leopards and barn owls and lions with cubs. Now Hugo is gone and so is most of the off-track driving. Today the park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve, parcelled up into strictly controlled management areas. It could hardly be otherwise with so many visitors wanting to see it, but this necessary transition to minimise the impact of modern tourism does mark the end of an era.

As for the future, the best hope for both of these priceless big game strongholds is that they can be merged to create a Serengeti-Mara transfrontier park along the lines of those being established in southern Africa. Only then, perhaps, will the survival of the most spectacular ecosystem on the planet be ensured.