September

In this week’s London Evening Standard there was a feature on the Mara’s nemesis: the Serengeti. Apart from some chintzy nonsense about jeweled salads and a farcical faunal faux pas about okapis butting horns (surely topis) it was none too shabby…

Too often awards are concocted, self-serving and cynical: ‘you advertise in our Bush Companion and we’ll give you a worthless accolade,’ or the winner is the one that garners the most solicited support on social media.

The herds are in and the fawns are dropping: the larder is full. This is the time of plenty in Conservancies that are seldom short of food on the table.

Scenes like this are harrowing and desperately upsetting. That’s just for the viewers, imagine the pain of this reticulated giraffe mother, her calf killed by lions and she feeling like Custer at Little Big Horn yet she still battles to ensure the carcass is not defiled.

Leave time is precious time, apparently even for Ryan Air Pilots, so when Jimmy Tinka has repeat safari-goers with a yen for leopards he knows just how to oblige them in Mara North.

When you are dealing with fabled diva’s sometimes it takes a while for them to appear on the red carpet. However frustrating this may be, no amount of tantrums or tiara’s will make a shred of difference.

It is a common and frankly absurd misconception to describe ruminants bisecting the Mara River as a ‘migration’.

In a break with 15 years of ‘Spot’ tradition, today’s issue does not deal with animals. The custodians of the Mara are Masai.

Just as Ryder Cup hostilities start brewing up, it appears that Valley camp fauna has got in on the niggling aggro act with more ‘rough’ than ‘fairway’.