Ask anyone planning a Kenya safari what they’d most like to see and the answer is almost always the same: the Big Five. The lion, the leopard, the African elephant, the Cape buffalo and the rhinoceros. These five animals have captured the imagination of wildlife lovers all over the world for generations and Kenya is one of the best places on earth to come face to face with all of them in their natural habitat.
They are the focus of almost every safari itinerary and the topic of countless wildlife movies and that’s the reason that many people choose to visit Africa in the first place.
But the term Big Five has a much darker origin than most people realise, and knowing that origin adds a layer of depth and complexity to the experience of encountering these animals in the wild.
It also raises important questions about the relationship between man and beast which are worth sitting with on a safari, when you are close enough to these animals to bring the weight of what they represent.
Where the term came from
The Big Five were not actually classified by conservationists or wildlife photographers. The term was coined by big game hunters in the colonial era and it referred to the five animals that were the most dangerous and so most prized to hunt on foot.
The lion and leopard for their ferocity and unpredictability when threatened, the elephant and buffalo for their size and willingness to charge and the rhinoceros for its aggression and poor eyesight, which made encounters with it particularly dangerous. These were the animals that most often killed hunters and it was precisely this difficulty that made them desirable trophies.
Today, the term has been reclaimed entirely by the tourism and conservation industry as a fest of Africa’s most iconic wildlife and the Big Five are now being associated with camera lenses rather than rifle barrels. But knowing the origin of the phrase puts you in the minority of visitors that understand what they are actually looking at – creatures that survived millennia of predation, climate change and human encroachment, and are now one of the most protected and monitored animals on the continent.
The lion
Kenya’s lion population is concentrated mostly in the Masai Mara, Amboseli, Tsavo and Samburu. The Mara is the best park for lion sightings by a long way, with several large, well-studied prides, highly habituated to safari vehicles and subjects of long-term research programmes.
Lions are deep, social animals, and watching a pride interact – the cubs playing, fighting with a patience-testing ferocity, the males resting with their particular brand of lordly indifference, the females coordinating before a hunt with a precision that speaks to years of learned cooperation – is one of the most compelling wildlife experiences Kenya offers.
Dawn and dusk is the best time to be out for lions as the cooler temperatures draw them out of the shade and onto the hunt. During the heat of the day, lions are champions of energy conservation – they can sleep up to twenty hours in twenty-four – and it takes a sharp eye to find them under a tree in the midday sun.
Lion conservation in Kenya is closely monitored and assisted by the Kenya Wildlife Service, whose website gives up-to-date conservation statistics and wildlife data specific to each park.
The leopard
Of all the Big Five, the leopard is the hardest to find and, for many visitors, the most memorable when it is finally spotted. They are solitary and largely nocturnal and masters of concealment – capable of disappearing into vegetation in ways that seem physically impossible for an animal that can weigh up to sixty kilograms.
A leopard lying along a branch in dappled shade is virtually invisible until it moves, and even experienced guides sometimes drive past them without noticing they are there.
The Masai Mara and Laikipia Plateau are the best places for leopard viewing in Kenya and having a good guide who knows the areas of individual animals and the trees they like most gives you a much better chance. When you do find one – perhaps stretched out along a tree branch in the golden afternoon light with a kill cached in the branches beside it – the experience stops conversation. There is something about the combination of beauty and latent danger in a leopard at rest that is like no other experience you can have in wildlife.
The African elephant
Kenya’s elephant population is one of the most celebrated in the African continent and Amboseli is the best park in the country for elephant encounters. The herds here are large, calm and very used to the presence of vehicles. The research being conducted by the Amboseli Elephant Research Project – one of the longest running wildlife studies in the world, tracking individual elephants and their families over a number of generations – means that many of the animals you encounter have been documented and named, their life histories known to researchers in remarkable detail.
Elephants are very smart, emotionally complex creatures with long memories, strong family bonds and demonstrated capacity for having grief, joy and using tools. Spending time watching them in the wild transforms your thought process about non-human consciousness in ways that endure long after the safari is over.
The Sheldrick Wildlife Trust based in Nairobi has been rescuing and rehabilitating orphaned elephants for decades, and they provide important context to the elephants you see on safari – context about the threats to them, the intelligence they possess and the conservation effort that is needed to protect them.
The Cape buffalo
Consistently under-estimated by first-time visitors in favour of more glamorous members of the Big Five, the Cape buffalo is arguably the most dangerous animal on the list. They are powerful, unpredictable, highly intelligent and famed for circling back to ambush and charge perceived threats – a behaviour that has earned them a grim reputation by hunters and guides alike. Old solitary bulls, separated from the herd by age or injury, are thought to be especially dangerous and are given wide berth by even experienced field guides.
In the Mara and Tsavo, you can see buffalo in herds that may number in the thousands – a wall of dark bodies moving slowly across the plain, horns catching the light, dust rising in clouds around their hooves. It is one of those sights that tells one, in a way that the sighting of individual animals cannot, the sheer biomass of the African savannah. Do not dismiss the buffalo simply because it is not as photogenic as a lion.
The rhinoceros
Kenya’s rhino population was decimated by poaching in the latter half of the twentieth century, from tens of thousands of animals to a few hundred animals in the space of a generation. Wild rhino sightings are not common anymore in most parks as a result, but the conservation story since then is one of actual hard-won progress.
The best place to see rhino in Kenya today is Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, which has the largest black rhino population in East Africa and is also home to the last two northern white rhinos on earth – Najin and Fatu, a mother and daughter, who are the functional end of their species. Their story is a sobering one, and an essential lens through which to understand the stakes of wildlife conservation.
Visiting Ol Pejeta is an emotionally complex and deeply important one. You leave, not just with an amazing wildlife encounter, but with a better understanding of what has been lost and what is still possible to protect – if the will, and the resources exist to do so.
