Usain Bolt adopted a cheetah in Kenya, we almost all saw him take pictures in Kenya with the World’s fastest land animal. He of course is the fastest man on earth having shuttered records for fun in last couple of years.
After Rupi Mangat had missed all three sightings of the elusive cheetah she had to console herself with pictures from the feisty chairperson of the Friends of Nairobi National Park – FoNNAP – Dr. Paula Kahumbu. This was during a camping safari in Nairobi national park which still has a good number of wildlife.
Later they moved on to the 6,000-acre wildlife haven; Lisa Ranch and Sanctuary which has wildebeest, giraffes, Grant’s and Tommies, elands plus a lot of other plains game. The ranch definitely rivers the Masai Mara and it also has lots of Kori bustards and other bird species.
One would be forgiven for thinking that they were doing a Masai Mara tour during a wildebeest migration. Or even in the Samburu national park renowned for its large number of svelte gerenuk which has been dabbed by many as the long-necked giraffe antelope. A herd of these beautiful creatures watch as they drive past on the rim of the hills of Waami which Mbithi Michael of the ranch describes as the “sleeping lady” because it looks like silhouette of a woman lying on her side with its spectacular views of the forest glades on either side. Michael in his early 30s, whose passion for the wildlife runs deep says they have been managing wildlife on the ranch since 1991. He practically knows every hill and brow in the ranch and he was only 10 years old when he first arrived on the land with his dogs and it was when he first spotted a cheetah.
He has since then never stopped looking out for the cheetahs in the ranch which has a very high concentration of the wild cats. It is not hard to see why these now rare cats are in high numbers – the plains are vast and there are plenty of Thompson’s gazelles and other wildlife for them to easily feast on.
Michael says that first gerenuks which were all females came to the ranch of their own accord. However, they were all females and so they had to ask for permission from the wildlife authorities to let them bring in 6 males from the Selankay conservancy near Amboseli in 1999 and are now numbering 40 in all.
He also says the lesser Kudu a type of antelope with spiral horns located 15kilometers away are about to get extinct if nothing is done to save them. They were enticed into the ranch in about the year 2000 when they were living in unprotected areas where they faced a lot of poaching for bush meat.
Wildlife have and are still faced with a number of threats. According to Michael the plains in the 1890s were teeming with wildlife most of which have now been decimated. There’s potential however to bring back most the wildlife like buffalo and topi which were once wiped out from the plains by rinderpest.
For your East Africa wildlife tours:
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