Cheetahs, cheetahs and more cheetahs…!

I’ve just come back from 10 days at Kicheche Bush Camp with Paul Goldstein. It was meant to be a week-long Exodus trip, but when that was cancelled due to the new Covid restrictions, I booked privately with Paul, and I’m so glad I did!

He is probably the best photographer-guide I’ve ever spent time with. He puts photography first, so although that may mean plenty of early starts at 0600, the advantage is that you’re pretty much guaranteed to be in the right spot at the right time in order to take pictures of the wildlife.

Normally, game drives involve driving around until you see an animal, stopping to take a few pictures and then carrying on until you see the next one, but Paul ‘Feline’ Goldstein is obsessed with the big cats, so his take on the game drive involves finding lions, leopards or cheetahs and simply sticking with them.

Yes, that may involve a few hours’ waiting around watching them sleep, but he’s a great raconteur and mimic, so the time passes pretty quickly and very amusingly as he recounts endless stories, impressions and sketches from The Fast Show.

The other great payoff is that you’re always with the cats when they finally get around to hunting. I saw one cheetah kill on this trip, and that means I’ve seen six in 16 days with Paul at Kicheche…!

Kicheche

Kicheche is owned by Paul Goldstein and a couple of partners and consists of four camps in Kenya - three in the Masai Mara (Bush, Mara and Valley) and one in Laikipia.

I spent a week at Kicheche Bush Camp in 2018, and I was so impressed with the leopard sightings and cheetah kills that I was keen to go back.

The camp is run by a lovely couple, Darren and Emma, and consists of a main area with two adjoining tents (with wifi coverage) plus various tents for the guests and staff.

The guest accommodation is very comfortable, with proper beds, a sink with (cold!) running water and a bucket shower that’s available after the afternoon game drive.

The staff are all very friendly, and I had an excellent driver for the whole of my stay in Charles, who was very laid-back.

The food is also excellent, which is no surprise given that Darren and Emma managed a restaurant in Mombasa a few years ago.

The usual daily itinerary was a morning game drive from 0600-1200 with a bush breakfast in the vehicle, followed by lunch back at camp at around 1300, then an afternoon game drive from 1600-1930 and finally dinner in the main area at around 2100.

The menu varied on a daily basis, but breakfast usually consisted of homemade muesli, fruit and yoghurt followed by sausages, muffins and/or ‘rollex’, a local speciality that was essentially a chapati and an omelette wrapped together.

There was always a jar of kachumbari (Kenyan salsa) to spice things up, and drinks included various fruit juices and coffee.

Lunch was generally a buffet, with a selection of meat, vegetable and salad dishes and various sauces introduced by Darren, although we did have pizzas made-to-order a couple of times, which were excellent.

Dinner followed roughly the same format, with the occasional special event like ‘curry night’.

Wildlife photography

The best way to summarise the week is probably to focus on the individual animals that we saw.

Unfortunately, we didn’t see Fig or any other leopards, which was a great shame as she had two very young cubs with her, but that was more than made up for by a spectacular cheetah kill by The Five Musketeers, followed by a frantic feeding right next to our vehicle!

The weather wasn’t great, being unseasonably cold and rainy most of the time, but we did have one misty sunrise when we were able to get some iconic shots of a Cape buffalo and a topi.

Finally, on my last day, we were lucky enough to see a couple of European bee-eaters, and I got a couple of good shots to finish off my trip.

Cheetahs

Of all the game drives I’ve been on with Paul Goldstein, we’ve spent most of our time either with cheetahs or looking for them. They offer the best opportunity of seeing a kill during the day, so it’s a worthwhile search.

On this trip, we were lucky enough to see several groups of cheetahs, including two males, a female with three cubs and a male ‘hanger-on’ and The Five Musketeers - the most famous cheetahs in the entire Masai Mara.

It was these five cats that provided us with a spectacular kill when they chased a Coke’s hartebeest into a marshy area and finally brought it down and throttled it.

Paul got a couple of good shots using his trademark ‘slow pan’ method, but mine were all useless - although I did at least see the big splash as the cheetah collided with the hartebeest.

It’s tough to take shots of a 70mph cheetah chase at 1/60 or 1/80 of a second, but they look fantastic if they work, so it’s worth a try.

The blur of legs and a smooth, almost creamy background create a unique style of image that has a great sense of energy and movement that you’ll never get from freezing the action at 1/1000 or 1/2000 of a second.

The other aspect to that kill was the feast that followed. This is not necessarily the greatest opportunity for photography as the images might be a bit gory or gruesome for most tastes, but it was fantastic to be no more than a few feet from the action as the cheetahs all tucked in with gusto.

I even managed to take a couple of videos, and you can hear the crunching sound as the cheetahs ate their meal. It reminded me of my father’s favourite grace: “Lord, give us the grace and the power to shift this lot in half an hour…!”

I admit that I’m far more comfortable taking portraits rather than action shots - however much I prefer the latter - but Paul is always happy to experiment, so having him in my vehicle was a great chance to learn different types of shot and put them into practice.

One in particular involved getting as low as possible so that the grass in the foreground dissolved into a green blur and hid the lower half of the cheetah. We had a go at this a couple of times, and the results were just a little bit different from the norm.

This style of photography seems to be quite fashionable these days, with photographers such as Michel d’Oultremont winning plenty of awards for similar images - although in his case the foreground is generally snow rather than grass.

The point is that there are thousands if not millions of ‘normal’ portraits of cheetahs, so why not try something different?

Finally, the other technique that works very well with cheetahs is the slow pan. Paul taught me this in Spitsbergen back in 2014, and I remember practising all day on kittiwakes and guillemots. It was pretty tough, though, and I only kept four out of 1,504 shots!

Again, the virtue of experimenting is that you end up with a much better image. It’s certainly not to everyone’s taste, but if you can balance the blurred legs and background with a sharp eye, then you’ll have something very special.

I probably didn’t spend enough time taking slow pan shots rather than fast portraits - despite Paul’s cajoling! - but a couple of them turned out reasonably well.

Lions

As well as the cheetahs, we had a couple of very good sightings of a local lion pride. The first time we saw them, it was only my second day, so it was a great start to the trip. The cubs were incredibly energetic and playful, so it was hard to keep track of the action, but I ended up with a few cute portraits.

Buffalo

As I mentioned earlier, the weather was unseasonably cold and wet, so it was almost impossible to get any shots during the Golden Hours at sunrise and sunset.

The only chance we had came when it cleared up overnight, resulting in a very misty dawn. It was a bit of a struggle to find any animals to photograph given the poor visibility, but we finally managed to find a topi and a few Cape buffalo that suited our purposes.

It was a gorgeous sunrise, and Paul and I were madly taking pictures as fast as we could before the light and the weather changed. Paul managed a great shot of a buffalo appearing to ‘carry’ the rising sun between its horns, but at least I had the advantage of having an 800mm lens…!

Elephants

I do find it hard to get excited about taking pictures of elephants - mostly because they don’t have a ‘relatable’ face in the same way as the big cats, for example.

However, there are opportunities if you can find one giving itself a dust bath (as I did myself in Chobe, Botswana), and at Kicheche we were lucky enough to find an old bull elephant on the horizon at sunset a couple of times.

This is ideal for elephant photography as they have such a recognisable, iconic shape in silhouette.

On the first occasion, Paul again did much better than I did, but it was fun running around in front of the elephant to get the best possible position in relation to the setting sun.

On the second occasion, Paul wasn’t with me, and it was nice to be able to take my time with the shots. The light wasn’t perfect, but this time the elephants were perfectly on the horizon, which allowed me to get better silhouettes.

I also took a few slow pan shots of elephants, and this is my favourite.

Other

As well as the regular sightings of cheetahs and lions, I had the odd lucky break that allowed me to take some pretty good pictures. One came when we arrived at a man-made waterhole, and I noticed that the water was reflecting a very pale cloudy sky, so it looked like the hippo was ‘floating’ in mid-air…!

Another opportunity came on my final day. Paul and I had just been talking about lilac-breasted rollers and bee-eaters when suddenly we saw a few of them by the side of the road. Paul suggested 1/100 of a second for the roller, but the only decent shot I took of it was a conventional portrait.

I was rather lucky with the bee-eaters. I had to switch cameras, but I forgot to check the shutter speed. In fact, it was 1/640 of a second, which turned out to be perfect in order to freeze the fly and the body of the bird while still allowing the wings to blur nicely.

Covid

The effect of Covid on the hospitality industry have been devastating in most parts of the world, and Kicheche is no exception. It’s been very hard for them to keep the camp open due to the lack of guests, and a lot of the staff have had to accept reduced wages for the duration of the crisis.

I was glad to be able to do my bit to support the business, but it was a close-run thing. My Exodus trip was cancelled, and even when I’d booked everything privately, I was suddenly faced with having to get a negative Covid test in order to return to the UK.

That would usually have meant losing a day on safari in order to travel back to Nairobi and get my test results within 72 hours of arrival in the UK.

Fortunately, though, there was a nurse at the nearby Mahali Mzuri camp who was able to give me a PCR test and email me the results within 24 hours, so I dodged that particular bullet.

It was also lovely to be able to live a few days of my life without having to worry about constantly sanitising my hands or wearing a mask!

Given all the dramas I had going to Namibia in October 2020, I was a bit worried that the same kind of thing might happen to me again when I went to Kenya, so I was lucky that I managed to complete the trip without any major problems.

Yes, I had to go through security three times at JKIA airport in Nairobi, and, yes, it took me an hour to get through immigration at Heathrow, but that was a small price to pay for such a wonderful trip.

Whatever your situation with regard to the Covid restrictions and whether you’ve been vaccinated or not, I highly recommend it to anyone who loves wildlife.

To find out more about the Kicheche camps and/or book a trip, visit kicheche.com, send an email to sales@kicheche.com or call +254202493512/ 69.

Butcher's bill

1 x pair of shorts (left on top of the wardrobe…!)

I didn’t lose or break anything else (although I forgot where I’d put my glasses one morning!), but I did come back with a rather unsightly swelling under one eye. It must have been either a piece of grit or an insect bite.

Pictures

In all, I took 16,742 photos and videos, broken down as follows:

• 16,692 photos

  • 5 five-star (0.03%)

  • 47 four-star (0.3%)

  • 1,975 three-star (11.8%)

• 50 videos

Species list

Animals (32)

African bush elephant 

African wild cat

Banded mongoose

Bat-eared fox

Black-backed jackal

Blue wildebeest 

Cape buffalo 

Cheetah

Coke’s hartebeest

Common eland

Common impala

Common warthog 

Defassa waterbuck

Dwarf mongoose

Grant’s gazelle

Grey-capped social weaver

Hildebrandt’s starling

Hippopotamus 

Kirk’s dik-dik

Lion

Masai giraffe

Olive baboon

Plains zebra

Scrub hare

Serval 

Spotted hyena

Terrapin

Thomson’s gazelle

Three-banded plover

Topi

Tree agama

Vervet monkey

Birds (62)

African black-headed oriole

African fish eagle

African grey hornbill

African mourning dove 

African paradise-flycatcher

Augur buzzard

Barn swallow

Bateleur

Black-bellied bustard

Black-chested snake-eagle

Black-crowned night-heron

Black-headed heron

Black-shouldered kite

Cinnamon-breasted rock bunting

Common egret

Common ostrich 

Common sandpiper 

Crowned lapwing

Egyptian goose

European roller

Fiscal shrike

Green wood-hoopoe

Grey crowned crane

Grey-backed fiscal

Grey-headed kingfisher 

Grey kestrel

Hamerkop

Helmeted guineafowl

Hildebrandt’s starling

Jackson’s widowbirds 

Kori bustard

Lappet-faced vulture 

Lilac-breasted roller 

Little bee-eater

Little egret

Malachite kingfisher 

Martial eagle

Masked weaver

Montagu’s harrier

Northern white-crowned shrike 

Nubian woodpecker

Olive woodpecker 

Red-necked spurfowl

Ring-necked dove

Rosy-breasted longclaw

Rüppell’s long-tailed starling

Secretary bird

Silverbird 

Sooty chat

Superb starling

Tawny eagle

Three-banded plover

Verreaux’s eagle owl

Violet-backed starling 

Wattled plover

White-backed vulture

White-bellied bustard

White-browed coucal

White-faced whistling duck

White-headed buffalo weaver

Yellow-billed oxpecker

Yellow-throated longclaw

If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.

If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.