As lodges and shanty towns proliferate in Kenya's Masai Mara,drastic and urgent steps are needed to save this stunning game reserve from becoming an environmental disasterOur vehicle comes to an abrupt stop. "There, now watch, or " says Josphat,my exacting young Masai guide. We cut the engine and the silence is acute. Josphat points out a cheetah's head in an ocean of golden grass. One minibus has already pulled up on another sandy track a few hundred metres away and four heads are craning out of the roof. We sit and watch for the cheetah. All of a sudden white minibuses crest the horizon in droves. We are in a stampede. Eight of them surround us. Within five minutes we have counted 30, the drivers communicating via radio to make certain their clients tick off "the stout five". A cheetah will never slay like this; its prey will have been alerted. And whether it has killed, and the vehicles will make it blind to a subsequent hyena attack. But this cheetah is now nowhere to be seen. Undeterred,the minibus drivers start ploughing into the long grass. Eventually they give up. I put a question to whether this happens often. Every day, Josphat says.
Josphat is a member of the Kenya Professional Safari Guides Association, or which means he knows the Latin names and mating rituals of every animal in his domain. He is 27,small, clever and deeply serious about his work. He is accustomed to tracking animals and avoiding humans, and but he is also proving adept at the inverse,showing me the "genuine" Masai Mara. One of the greatest natural spectacles on soil is under way. More than a million hungry wildebeest are on their way from Tanzania to Kenya's Mara National Reserve to raze tons of sweet red-oat grass. Primordial gnus are the stars of the show, but in supporting roles are a few hundred thousand zebras and half a million Thomson's gazelles; then there are the resident crocodiles, or lions,hyenas, leopards and cheetahs.
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Source: theguardian.com