Hi! My name is Ivan Glaser. I am a passionate wildlife lover and award winning wildlife photographer.

Join me on a Maasai Mara Photo Safari, an experience of a lifetime!

Photography in the Mara

The quality of animal sightings and the photographic opportunities in the Maasai Mara are second to none. This is because of both the abundance of animals in the Mara and, with the appropriate guides and permits, the ability to go “off-road”. As such, you are always up close and personal with the animals, no matter where they are. This is unlike most other national parks in Africa where you have to stick to the roads. A Maasai Mara Photo Safari is high quality and certainly an experience never to be forgotten.

Where is the Maasai Mara ?

The Maasai Mara is situated in Kenya and forms the northern tip of Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. It lies in the Great Rift Valley, a fault line which stretches some 5,600km from Ethiopia’s Red Sea through Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and into Mozambique. It is characterized by a wide valley and a towering escarpment in the hazy distance.

The Maasai Mara ecosystem covers around 1,500km² of the total combined Mara-Serengeti ecosystem which covers around 25,000km²

Habitats of the Mara

Habitats in the Maasai Mara are varied, including beautiful open rolling grassland, riverine forest, Acacia woodland, swamps, non-deciduous thickets, boulder-strewn escarpments, and scrub. The permanent Mara and Talek Rivers, and their tributaries, flow through the Reserve and approximately trisect it.

Animals of the Mara

The Maasai Mara is remarkable for its great concentration of large herbivores and their attendant predators. The extraordinary annual migration of some two million Wildebeest and 200,000 Plains Zebra is world famous and usually happens between the months of July and October, depending on the rains. The impressive annual migration is considered to be one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

Almost 2.5 million large herbivores together with the smaller species inhabit the Mara ecosystem. according to UNESCO, Mara has the largest number of savannah species in the world. It has over, 650,000 gazelle, 62,000 buffalo, 64,000 impala, 60,000 topi, 7,500 hartebeest, 7,000 giraffe, 3,000 eland and 4,000 elephant . There are particularly large numbers of Lion, Spotted Hyena, Cheetah, Leopard as well as populations of the threatened black rhinoceros and African hunting dog. There are also an abundance of uncounted antelope, hippo and warthog.

More than 500 bird species can be found in the Mara, including 53 birds of prey species.

How did the Mara get it’s name ?

The Maasai Mara game reserve is named in honour of the Maasai people, the ancestral inhabitants of the land. “Mara” is a local Maasai word meaning “spotted” and is called this due to the many short bushy trees which dot the landscape.

Interested in visiting the Mara ?

If you are interested in going on a Maasai Mara Photo Safari, please see my Safari page.