Maasai Mara means spotted, after the bushes dotting its grassland
Seen from a distance, the Kenyan plains near the Tanzanian border look speckled with short, bushy trees, so the Maasai called the place Mara, meaning spotted in their Maa language. Every July it becomes the stage for the Great Migration, when around 1.3 million blue wildebeest pour north across the Mara River.
The reserve lies in Narok County and forms the northern tip of the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem, running into Tanzania's Serengeti National Park to the south. Created as a 520 square kilometre sanctuary in 1961, it was enlarged that same year to 1,821 square kilometres, then trimmed in stages until it covered 1,510 by 1984. Its western edge is the Esoit escarpment, part of the East African Rift, a chain of rifts some 5,600 kilometres long. Swampy ground there keeps water plentiful and draws the densest wildlife, while tourists crowd the east, closer to Nairobi.
Open grassland, acacia clumps in the south-east and three main rivers shape the land. Long rains fall in April and May, short rains in November and December, and annual totals rise from about 800 millimetres in the east to 1,200 in the west. Wildebeest arrive from the Serengeti around July in search of fresh grass and head back south around October, joined by hundreds of thousands of gazelles and zebras.
All of the Big Five live here. The Mara is the only protected area in Kenya whose native black rhinos have never been topped up by translocations. Poaching in the 1970s and early 1980s cut them to as few as 15; the Mara Conservancy counted just one when it took over its section in 2001 and a stable 25 to 30 by 2023. BirdLife International lists the park as an Important Bird Area, with over 500 species, including almost 60 raptors and Kenya's national bird, the lilac-breasted roller.
The Maasai, who came from the Nile Basin, were pushed off much of this land before the reserve existed, partly because of smallpox in people and rinderpest in cattle. In 2008 about half a million people spoke Maa. When COVID-19 emptied the lodges, a rescue fund helped conservancies keep paying Maasai landowners their leases.
Source: Maasai Mara
