Our time has gone so fast. It’s just hard to believe that we are down to our last full safari day. We decided to go into the Mara Triangle National Park to look for rhinos.
There are only a few rhinos left in the area so chances are slim for success. No luck today, but it seemed we saw everything else; elephant families feeding in the lugga, cheetahs hunting in the tall golden grass, Topi on the termite mounds, large slow moving herds of giraffe, big muscular waterbuck males locking horns in the marsh, zebras rolling in the dust, crowned cranes drinking at an ephemeral pond, secretary birds stomping on their prey before snapping it up, Hammerkop hunting catfish in a shallow creek, and a black-breasted fish eagle at its nest in an alien-looking candelabra tree.
Everywhere you looked, everywhere you turned, there was something amazing, something memorable, and something beautiful. It will be hard to pack up tomorrow, take that final game drive, and board the plane to leave the Mara. However, we are still in the middle of an immense today. I am consciously trying to soak it all in and record memories that I will draw from later when I return home. I don’t want to forget the awe that I have felt for this place or the overpowering sense of wonder.
We decided it was time for lunch so we headed toward the shade of a lone acacia tree within a few hundred feet of the border with Tanzania. It was one of the few places in the park, for that matter in the region, with a picnic table. We had decided on a rather civilized location for our last bush lunch.
We pulled up to the tables and realized lunch at the table was not to be - there seemed to be an insurmountable problem. There in the cool shade of the acacia were two beautiful tables constructed from stone and concrete all right but the difficulty came from the fact that there were also two very large lions sleeping on them. The lions each had claimed their own personal table. They exceeded the length of the table so their tails hung off at one end and their head and front legs drooped over the other. The cats slept soundly in a deep contented, full-bellied, sleep and were totally mindless of the land cruiser, and its astonished passengers, which were parked only a few feet from them. I took the opportunity to take reference photos of footpads, tail, fur, and face details and then we searched elsewhere for a place to have lunch.
On our way back through the park we stopped for two mating lions at the side of the road. The lion’s idea of courtship is a bit more radical than that of most humans. The first male that gets to a female in heat becomes her consort, which handily eliminates the wear and tear of fighting among the strong males. The happy couple then leaves the pride for 4-7 days during which time they mate, on average, 2.2 times per hour and in the case of the lions we watched it can occur 4-5 times per hour. The actual act of mating lasts less than a minute after which they promptly lie down and sleep only to wake up from their nap in a few minutes and do it all again. Only one estrus in 5 results in a pregnancy; cubs are born 14-15 weeks later.
A female with cubs will not be ready to breed again for 20-30 months after the birth. Because of this if the pride is taken over by a new male the newcomer will often kill all the pride’s cubs. As soon as the cubs are gone the female will come into heat again. This infanticide is a brutal but very effective means of ensuring that the dominant male’s genes are passed on and the previous male’s are not.
Throughout the afternoon as we drove we watched towering columns of white cumulous clouds building on the horizon. Finally by late afternoon the clouds coalesced into threatening grey sky then collapsed into the thick black of a very healthy, very intense, storm. Splashing through flood waters, crawling the truck over rocky roads and slipping and sliding through the Mara mud, Dixon expertly returned us to camp by 6 pm in time for a hot shower, warm dinner, and our last night at the camp.
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