Lessons from a Masai Mara Safari

[Adventure Panorama Tours]

Be ready to learn a lot of lessons during your participation in one of our regular Kenya safari trips including Masai Mara tours. Wild animals are very humble creatures and quite interesting to watch as they go about their routine chores of looking for food. During these interesting Tanzania adventure and Kenya trips, you will realize that each category of animals have their own way of escaping predators, looking for daily bread, defending and bringing up their young ones, which in turn results to the general life survival strategy.

Maasai Mara national reserve is one of the most frequently visited parks in Kenya with the highest chances to view elephants, lions, cheetahs, buffalos, leopards and rhinos, both black and white. Most of these animals mix so well, that you might think they are members of the same family. In fact other animals and birds depend on their fellows for food and survival. The cattle egrets neither feed on grass nor buffalo dung, but you will always see them walking side by side like great friends. The buffalos help them locate grasshoppers and other flying insects which is a fundamental part of their meal. Spotting such minute adventures requires a lot of keenness and spices up Africa safaris to a paradise of fun.

Your Africa holidays will also prove to you that grazers and browsers find their food without too much of a hassle unlike predators, except that they have to keep their heads up in between their feeding lest they fall a prey. Serengeti tours or Maasai Mara safaris will never be complete without the drama of a carnivore on a hunting spree. Antelopes are known for lifting their heads every now and then to sniff the air for any scent of danger. A group of topi antelopes will always assign one of their family members the duty of standing on an ant hill to be on the lookout for any danger approaching.

The first time I spotted an impala bounding away with spectacular leaps from side to side and kicking their hind legs in the air, I thought it was a way of  show-off to a lion that could not match it in the race. Little did I know that this is a typical characteristic that helps them  to release some scent from its glands on their fetlocks into the air. When I referred to my tour-guide book, I realized that this helps to pass the message to fellow impalas that there is danger in their surroundings.

When I was in my late teen age and I was just developing a strong feeling to venture into the world of Africa tour destination management, my late grandfather advised me never to eat any hot food prior to my wizard tracking mission. This was a very good advice for my cultural safari experience. He told me that the wizards are so sensitive to smell, that they would easily notice a human being in a hide-out! So, eating a cold food would slow down the rate of digestion and keep the temperatures as low as possible. This would increase the chances of catching one, especially approaching from downwind.

However, popular to this famous belief, notorious predators like cheetahs and lions don’t consider the wind direction when hunting. They  try to stalk to as close as possible and any slight realization of them will scatter the whole heard. This reaction causes the predators to be more aggressive and enhances a long great chase in vast plains of Masai Mara and Serengeti in East Africa.

[Molten Rock Safaris]

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