For many months last year, my camera trap quietly monitored a remote river crossing in a forested corner of the Maasai Mara.

I placed it there in collaboration with rangers monitoring the Maasai Mara’s endangered black rhino population.

The project came about through my friend Oli Dreike, whom I first met in Zambia. He now works with The Safari Collection’s Footprint Trust, which supports conservation and community projects across Kenya. In that role, he had been working closely with the Maasai Mara Reserve Rhino Unit, helping to establish the Maasai Mara Conservation Centre – a technology hub that supports their operations, including rhino GPS tagging and ear-notching. Recognising that camera traps could help monitor rhinos moving through dense forest, Oli brought us together.

For me, the opportunity was irresistible. The Maasai Mara is one of the most famous wildlife destinations on Earth, yet even here there are corners that very few people ever see. Placing cameras in areas closed to tourism offered a rare chance to document a hidden side of the Mara.

The Rhino Unit is responsible for monitoring the rhino population and helping to ensure the areas they use are properly protected. The rangers know both the landscape and the individual animals intimately, spending each day on patrol – on foot or by vehicle – locating rhinos and recording sightings.

Rhinos are identified through ear-notching, and some are also fitted with GPS tags. Combined with EarthRanger tracking data, this helps the team understand how the animals move through the reserve, which areas they favour, and which routes are especially important. Together with the rangers’ experience in the field, it gave us a strong basis for identifying promising sites for the camera traps.

They guided me to one such place.

It was a core rhino area: a patch of dense forest flanking a small river in a secluded valley. The rangers explained that rhinos regularly used the area, but were often extremely difficult to monitor there because the vegetation was thick and the animals were elusive.

A camera trap could help them keep tabs on these individuals more reliably.

The moment I saw the place, I knew it was perfect.

Entering the forest felt like stepping into another world.

Most people think of the Mara as endless open plains, but this was something completely different. Huge fig trees towered overhead, palms leaned over the river, and thick undergrowth screened well-worn animal trails.

The air was hot and heavy, filled with the smell of rhino, buffalo, hippo, and elephant dung.

It felt primordial, like a fragment of an older landscape hidden within the savannah.

The river itself was small but beautiful, cutting through the vegetation with steep banks on either side. When I followed one of the animal trails down to a crossing point, I found the location I had been looking for.

The trail was deeply worn by repeated passage, clearly used regularly by wildlife.

The elevated riverbanks meant I could place the camera high above the crossing, allowing the animals to be framed within the environment rather than filling the frame in a simple portrait. The palms arching over the water gave the scene a wonderfully prehistoric feel.

Standing there, imagining the images that might be possible, I had to pinch myself.

The setup used one of my Camtraptions camera trap systems.

The camera was mounted high on the riverbank, looking down towards the crossing, with a PIR motion sensor placed closer to the trail. Several flashes were positioned around the scene to illuminate both the animals and key elements of the background and vegetation.

Lighting nocturnal scenes like this is always a balancing act: too much light and you lose the atmosphere; too little and important elements disappear into darkness.

The camera trap was left running continuously.

The rangers checked it every couple of weeks to swap batteries and memory cards.

It quickly became clear that the crossing was even more productive than expected. It wasn’t long before the first rhino appeared on camera, and as the weeks went by, more followed.

Rather than capturing the same animal time and again, the camera revealed this to be a well-used corridor for multiple rhinos moving between feeding areas.

Several of these individuals had not been documented by the rangers for many months, and one had not been seen since 2023. As a result, the photographs helped confirm the continued presence of rhinos whose status in the population figures had previously remained uncertain, giving the team greater confidence in their estimates.

But rhinos were only part of the story.

Over time, the camera trap revealed an extraordinary variety of wildlife using the crossing.

Elephants passed through in breeding herds. A leopard appeared briefly before melting back into the forest. Hippos emerged from the river. Bushbuck and giraffe moved cautiously down to the water.

The crossing had become a window into the hidden life of the Mara.

One of the most exciting discoveries came unexpectedly.

When the rangers retrieved one memory card, a flurry of excited messages appeared in our WhatsApp group. At first, I didn’t understand the commotion.

A greater kudu had passed through the crossing.

For me, the image was exciting simply because kudu are such spectacular animals. But for the ranger team, it meant much more.

This was the first recorded sighting of a kudu in the area for many years.

The news quickly spread among the Narok County tourism and wildlife management team, who are working to protect and restore wildlife populations in the region. The possibility of reintroducing kudu had previously been considered, so the discovery that they were still present naturally was very exciting.

I returned to the Mara every couple of months to fine-tune the set-ups, reposition cameras, and deal with whatever problems had arisen.

This was one of five camera traps I deployed in the area, and not all of them survived intact.

Elephants dismantled one setup and another was knocked over by hippos. After a spectacular deluge, a flash flood submerged one of the sensors.

That same flood produced one of the most dramatic images of the project.

During the night, the quiet stream suddenly turned into a raging torrent, and the camera captured a black rhino forcing its way through the flooded river.

The photograph is striking, but it also hints at a wider issue in the Mara. Flash flooding has become more frequent in recent years, partly due to deforestation in upstream catchments. With less vegetation to absorb rainfall, water now runs off the hillsides faster and rivers rise more rapidly, contributing to repeated flooding along the Mara River.

Of all the images captured during the project, my favourite is this photograph of a rhino standing beside the river at night.

Rhinos have always struck me as deeply prehistoric animals, almost like mammalian dinosaurs. Seeing one in this palm-framed forest felt like witnessing a scene from another era.

But perhaps the most important thing this project revealed is a side of the Mara that most people never see.

Visitors experience the Mara by day, watching wildlife out on the open plains. But in the main reserve there is no night driving, so the Mara after dark remains largely hidden.

Camera traps provide a rare glimpse into that unseen world, showing how animals move through the landscape at night and how they use quiet, sheltered corridors where they can pass undisturbed. They are not only powerful storytelling tools but valuable instruments for conservation too, helping teams monitor elusive species and better understand how animals use the habitats they are trying to protect.

In places like this forested river crossing, the Mara feels very different from the savannah most people know.

It feels ancient.

And it is full of secrets.

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This project would not have been possible without the support and generosity of many people. My heartfelt thanks go to The Safari Collection’s Sala’s Camp and Footprint Trust for hosting me and helping to facilitate the project, and to all the staff for their warmth and hospitality throughout. I am also deeply grateful to the Narok County Government, the Maasai Mara Reserve Rhino Unit, and all the rangers involved – especially those who helped identify locations, set up and maintain the cameras, and look after them in my absence. Special thanks are also due to John Gitonga of KWS for sharing his extensive experience of rhino camera-trap monitoring with me and the team, and to John Tanui for being such an inspiring mentor to the ranger team. Finally, my thanks to the Mara Triangle team, who became involved later in the year and supported additional camera-trap deployments.