Wild Ride: Atlasing in the Mara region

It’s 05h30 and my heart is racing, my ears alert. I’ve just tried to escape a charging elephant bull on foot. While I hunker down in the bushes, listening for cracking branches or a low rumble emanating from the dense shrubs around me, I hear a Rufous-naped Lark, Tropical Boubou and a distant Schalow’s Turaco. A cacophony of 60 low-flying Grey Crowned Cranes distracts me momentarily from my potentially precarious situation. If it’s the last photograph I take, it might be worth it. When the cranes have passed I hear the roar of lions, but they are a way off. The stomach rumbling of the elephant sounds a safe distance away, so I return through the undergrowth to my companions, who are hidden at a water- hole observation point. Having witnessed the chase, it won’t be Green Sandpiper and the domestic squabbles of Egyptian Geese that they remember from this day.

- Alna Lee

This is a tale of an atlasing adventure to the Narok County district of Kenya, adjacent to the world- famous Maasai Mara National Reserve. I’d been invited to direct a Biosphere Expeditions group to conduct wildlife surveys in Enonkishu, the northern-most of the Mara conservancies. People come from all over the world – Finland, France, Australia and Germany, for example – to help with these expeditions. We would observe not only buffalo, cheetah, lion and leopard, but also the Maasai roaming with their large herds of cattle. The western boundary of the conservancy is the Mara River, beyond which lies a patchwork of small agricultural plots, intensively farmed and heavily populated.

The survey meant a chance to extend my BirdLasser life-list and to contribute to the Kenya BirdMap project. Since the project’s integration with the SABAP platform, birdwatchers in Kenya have been making great strides in creating good coverage of the country. However, there are still very large gaps, including the south-western section of the country in the direction of Lake Victoria.