I was born in Kenya in 1965, a turbulent time in this part of Africa with the uneasy onset of the “winds of change” sweeping the continent, with all sorts of upheaval and uncertainty. Very few countries in Africa escaped this; some emerged pretty much unscathed, others today still bear the scars of this tumultuous change. Writers like Robert Ruark romanticised this time and period with novels like Horn of the Hunterand Uhuru, still two of my all-time favorite novels! Other classics and favorite reads that bring this period in Africa to life are the works of Izak Denisen, Bartle Bull’s Safari and Markham’s West with the Night to mention a few.
Kenya, too, went through its fair share of upheaval and growing pains, but it has put its hand up as one of the top safari and wildlife destinations on the continent. It certainly has the many famous and world-renowned areas like the Maasai Mara, Mount Kenya, the Aberdares, Tsavo, the Ngong Hills and Mau Forest, Lake Turkana (the Jade Sea) and then, of course, Amboseli at the foothills of Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain. Many of these unusual and distant names were made household names and put on the map by the early hunters and explorers that graced these inhospitable lands (the personalities and list is endless, from Stanley, Burton and Speke to “Karamoja Bell”, Finch-Hatton and Selous). They not only carved a name for themselves but for Kenya too. They created history, started the first safaris, and ventured into the most exciting and unexplored realms, giving birth to what Kenya truly is today, a spectacular land of wildlife, landscapes and tribal culture. Many of Kenya’s tribes still live their lives relatively unchanged by man and the modern world, offering an insight into a bygone era of African myth and legend…the Masai, the Samburu, the Turkana, the Pokot…the list goes on!
Jumping to the present, I really believe that safari and travel to Africa through much of the last century was often seen as a type of fashion statement, something for the trendy and rich and famous! This was before Meryl Streep and Robert Redford brought Kenya and the era of safari travel alive again on the big screen with Out of Africa. The film was a massive hit, and even today I recommend it to would-be clients and prospective safari-goers. It truly embodies so many things about a very special place and a very special time.
A private safari to Kenya is a must for any keen traveler and wildlife enthusiast – it offers some of the greatest photographic opportunities in Africa, both wildlife and people. The land has so many varied landscapes and regions of natural beauty, some of the best coastline on the African continent, from world-class accommodations and facilities to the rugged semi-desert regions on Northern Kenya, inhabited by tribes that have not changed for hundreds of years. Some still warlike and proud, they have carved their own unique existence and niche in some rather inhospitable places. Other tribes are more approachable and amenable to tourists and visitor interaction. The Samburu and the Masai with their splendid, colorful “shukas” offer a wonderful distraction from game viewing and wildlife. This is one of the last places in Africa where one can have a truly interactive experience with the original native tribespeople in their natural state.
The beginning of any journey through Kenya starts with Nairobi, a city that is now one of Africa’s hubs. It bustles with life, color and sounds, and names like the Norfolk Hotel with the famous Lord Delamere room will ring bells. Today there is a myriad of choice and options. A particular favorite is The Giraffe Manor. This stylish and exclusive property offers something incredible unique. Whether dining or relaxing surrounded by Africa’s tallest mammals, it is not unusual for an inquisitive giraffe to put its head through the window and inspect one’s table!
Our Samburu Tracker and Masai driverOur Private Guide Ian Batchelor with Masai driver
If time permits, a visit to the Daphne Sheldrick Wildlife Orphanage is an inspiring and worthwhile way to spend some extra time in Nairobi.
The annual migration, or rather the “Great Migration” as it is more commonly referred to, meanders its way between Tanzania and Kenya in an endless cycle of movement and drama, from the birthing of the wildebeest calves on the short-grass plains of the Serengeti to the crossing of the Mara River into Kenya and the onset of the first rains. It is a miracle of nature, a magnificent and breathtaking journey, and something I believe everyone should try to see once in their lifetime at least. The Maasai Mara is wildlife-rich and possibly one of the greatest ecosystems and wildlife areas on the planet. It has diversity and beauty, teems with game, and has a rich make-up of predators. Lion, cheetah and leopard are all abundant, as are elephant and even black rhino in certain areas.
There are some wonderful safari combinations with the Maasai Mara, including conservancies to the north, such as Laikipia, Borana, Loisaba and Mugie, with sweeping views of the Aberdares and Mt Kenya (Africa’s second-highest mountain). These gems are now at the forefront of successful wildlife conservation. With community buy-in and support, they are leading the field in so many areas. Lewa is another conservancy that ranks among the best destinations on the continent, with many black and white rhino on the savanna plains. Other exciting wildlife areas in Kenya include Tsavo, the scene of the infamous man-eating lions at the turn of the last century.
Birds eye view, balloon safari over the Mara River
Follow in the footsteps of those early adventurers and see for yourself. It will be a journey you will never forget!
Ian was born in Nakuru, Kenya in 1965. He spent the early years of his life in this incredible and varied land before his parents moved to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Ian completed his schooling in Zimbabwe at Prince Edward High School for Boys before going to University where he attained an Honors Degree. He also spent a number of years in the South African Army in the 1980’s, part of a very interesting ‘life experience’ as he puts it! Ian began his work in the safari industry in 1991, he started out as a trainee canoe guide on the Zambezi River and worked his way up through various positions and companies. He was a Game Ranger at a private reserve in South Africa and then went on to hold the Senior Guide position in a company in Malawi & Zambia. In 1996 Ian moved to Tanzania, initially managing an exclusive new safari camp and then later guiding private and exclusive safaris throughout Tanzania for a leading American owned company. He worked, lived and guided in east Africa for the next 14 years. Ian is a qualified and experienced professional; holding both a PH and Professional Guide License in Zimbabwe and has a very strong conservation and wildlife centric background. A keen wildlife Photographer who loves to share his knowledge with his guests. Today he runs with his wife, Nonnie a successful safari operation, ‘Upmarket Safaris’ offering 50 odd years of combined experience – specializing in private guided journeys for the discerning traveler. They can be contacted at: ian@upmarketsafaris.net; nonnie@upmarketsafaris.net; www.upmarketsafaris.net
I got into the industry when I was quite young as I had worked for a furrier when I was just a boy. I had always been interested in taxidermied animals, and first started when I used a mail order from the back of a hunting magazine for a booklet on taxidermy. It was quite accurate though I think a little tough to understand for someone not trained in taxidermy. However, the illustrations and the tools they used for tanning were correct.
Just as I was getting ready to go to college, I worked for a famous local taxidermist, Louis Paul Jonas, from the American Museum. He had a studio north of us, about an hour away, and they did very simple work. They didn’t do any advertising, but their archives and what they had there was everything and more than you could ever imagine – like a museum studio.
Jonas died while in his 40s, and his clients were dispersed. Then I got a very famous Austrian gunsmith who dropped off a chamois for me to work on, and this was just as I was starting to work at Jonas’s former commercial studio in Mount Vernon, New York, down in the city. The studio was orinally the Tiffany glass factory before it moved to Long Island, so the place had a lot of history. The Austrian said if I wanted to really learn taxidermy, I needed to work for a place in a museum studio. We didn’t know each other, but he’s still a big friend of mine, hard to believe, 30 years later.
I went down there for a job interview and looked around. There was some archival stuff there, up to the roof – a lot of businesses had been there for 50 years or 60 years. There there old collections of work to be refurbished, and stock. They were overflowing with James Mellon’s trophies, that famous author who wrote African Hunter. There was amazing sculpture work and things from the original museums. The big elephant head that was there was probably one of the first reproductions. It looked like fibreglass, but made of papier maché and it was signed by all three Jonas brothers. It was was just so amazing. I never really realised taxidermy even went to those levels.
The person who interviewed me for the job at Jonas’s studios in New York, formerly Louis Paul’s commercial studio, was Steve Horn. Once I walked in the door, I was 100% sure that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and it’s not too many times in your life you’re that clear about anything. He made me call back there seven times to come get that job. I laughed because he said to me, “Well, what do you think you’re worth?” At the time I was 20, finishing my third year of college. I told him I had worked for a fur buyer when I was a kid. I did piece work for him, so by 12 years’ old l was trained in skinning animals using a beaming knife. I was probably making $10 an hour every day and it was an erratic schedule. I put in a lot of hours, and if necessary had to work on Christmas Day. It was fine, because that was my job, even as a young boy.
So when Steve Horn said, “Well what do you think you’re worth?” I said, “Well, I don’t know – I’m just sure this is what I want to do.”
He said that someone had just left and there was an opening for the shop. It wasn’t really as an apprentice, but Steve said, “You’ll learn a lot, you can work with these other taxidermists.” I was paid $4.10 an hour. I had to drive an hour and 40 minutes to work every day. So every week I wouldn’t really even take a pay cheque, I would just buy materials because I was doing taxidermy then, so I would buy pastes and have tanning done and things like that. But I worked there for years and I learnt a lot. I met some good, interesting people, and then as I progressed, I searched out other people in the industry, people that were connected to places that were very good in certain facets of taxidermy, like African work or doing cats. I would go work for them for free and then come back and I would retrain my men and change our material. So I did that probably three or four times in my life before I was 30.
At one point we were hired to work on Cabela’s projects and there was a pretty famous taxidermist who was handling those jobs. I had a tremendous amount of inventory that I had purchased over the years, and I kind of stepped into this strange job from this eccentric guy who wanted to build a Cabela’s type store, right in-between the two Cabela’s stores in West Virginia. They were going public, so they were making a big splash. We do all North American taxidermy, but when we got an opportunity to actually work for Cabela’s, they hired me to do exclusively African work.
Of course, African work is always the hardest with the highest level of detail, and I was really fortunate, because that’s when I met Wayne. They had sent their agents to collect skins and they made some deals with some guys in South Africa, game ranchers. They said, “Oh, we need kudus and this and this and this,” and they gave a laundry list. But the problem was, the first two times the skins came back, which is what they handed me, they were average-sized animals. The problem was, they wanted record-book-size horns which could be made as reproductions, but the skins were too small.
So I told him I had the inventory covered: “Why don’t you let me just supply the inventory, supply the grasses, the African birds, all the skins. I’ll do the reproduction horns so we have them from record-book-size animals. I’ll handle this for you, you don’t have any problem.” They agreed.
That helped me. Through those years I was able to do almost all African work for Cabela’s. I did a few other things for that Pennsylvania store, but they didn’t want to have one person handling everything. Africa was my thing. And then it also helped me to go to Africa and collect animals and spend a month over there with Wayne. He liked what we were getting, mostly skins, and I got the experience of hunting and vacation, and kept my own horns and skulls, and we used reproduction record-book ones on the animals in the bigger mounts in the stores. And then after that we did a lot of regular client African work, as well as North American work. On one occasion I was at Safari Club and had a big glass case with African birds in it, all the stuff that you see in a bird scene. I had maybe 15 birds in a case and a man walkedup to the case and said “Wow! I need those for my museum. Are those for sale?” I said, sure.
“How many do you have?”
“Oh, about 250.”
“I’ll take them all,” he said, shook my hand and said, “I’m Johnny Morris.” And that was the beginning of our relationship and he hired us for the African exhibits for him, and I think we did just short of 300 life-size animals for that museum. There were a lot of different parts of it that would take some expertise – not just doing it, but having the right brokers to bring these trophies in from outside that had been sitting in Africa for a long time. But we were able to get all that stuff done, as well as do some reproduction animals for him that were impossible to find, and do some restoration work on some things that were very complicated. Anyway, so it’s the African work and it’s what we do mostly.
Favorite animal? Almost everybody says cats because they’re complicated, and we absolutely have done lots of them. For me personally, my honest answer is, I don’t really have anything I would say is a favorite, but I like high detail and I like craftsmanship and natural positions on things, so I could say cats. But I don’t, because they’re probably the focal point in taxidermy. We’re not really doing any elephants or any lions, so that would have to mean leopards.
I think even though we’ve been fortunate enough to work on Cabela’s African displays and Johnny Morris’s African museum, and people with world-famous sheep and mountain scapes, we still do lots of normal work for people as far as African safaris and small safaris are concerned. We enjoy working with people when they’re new and when they start their trophy rooms and they start that journey of hunting of a lifetime. You start somewhere and start small.
And then we end up re-doing their trophy rooms, and we usually work for these people for most of their lives – and that’s true.
Just a quick update to let you know what’s been happening with me in the field.
My first hunt of the year was a leopard hunt with Andy from North Dakota. We hunted on Malangani where I knew there was a huge leopard – we saw him in 2019 lying on a three-quarters-grown wildebeest that he had just killed. He was 50 yards off the road and we watched him for quite a few minutes before he slunk off. This guy was our obvious target but he proved very elusive. All we could find was 10-day-old tracks in one riverbed but nothing else.
We baited the whole area hoping he would show up but he never did. Andy ended up taking another cat right near the end of the hunt. Dropping our baits on the last day we found his tracks from the night before in the same riverbed where we had found his old tracks. He had followed our drag to our bait but then just walked away.
At the beginning of June, Patrick, a retired policeman from NY, arrived with his nephew, James, for a buffalo hunt out of Nengo camp, again in the BVC. After torrential rains the bush was thicker than I’ve ever seen it, and I’ve been in the area for over 28 years! We caught the tail end of two cyclones that struck Mozambique.
As there was so much water about everywhere it was only after a few days that we found buffalo tracks to follow. Starting at 9.15 a.m. we followed them for many miles, often getting pretty close to them, but were unable to get sight of their horns. We finally called it quits and broke for lunch at 4 p.m.
The next morning we again found their tracks and got after them. The wind wasn’t that good but we spotted two bulls and managed to flank them and get the wind more in our favor. Creeping in close, Isaac and I saw that one bull had a good head and he was feeding into a slightly more open area. Please understand that the bush was still very thick, but at least we could see him. Moving Pat forward he finally got a shot and the bull was swallowed by dense, thick bush.
An example of the incredibly dense bush in which the wounded bull was hiding – totally invisible!
Trying to skirt the very thick stuff, both trackers said they could hear his labored breathing and then announced that he had fallen over. We got around the large thicket and moved closer on the hind side to look for blood. A few feet in front of us the bush suddenly exploded and he launched himself towards us at full speed. There was little time to react even though I was ready. As he passed on my left side at a distance of no more than six feet, I snapped a shot at his head, knowing he was headed straight for Pat and James. I guess the blast in his face and the 500-grain .470 that penetrated the nerve in his horn, persuaded him to change course and he ran between me and my friends as I gave him the second barrel just below the base of his tail. Much to our relief and to cut a long story short, we finally put him down after 13 shots. The good Lord was undoubtedly standing with us that morning. I don’t believe I’ve ever hunted in bush this thick!
We hope that you will join us in our little slice of paradise real soon.
This is a cautionary tale for those of you that hunt internationally and wire large sums of money for deposits, trophy fee pre-payments for after safari final payments for extras.
In August of 2020 I booked several dangerous-game hunts in Zimbabwe for international clients. My normal procedure has been to issue a written quote along with a deposit wiring instruction PDF by email. Unbeknownst to me, criminals had hacked into my email account and were waiting for just such an opportunity. They intercepted and modified my wiring instructions to divert the funds to a series of fraudulent bank accounts in Texas, and began communicating with my clients out of my email account as if they were me. In some instances, the clients had received my original instructions but were subsequently contacted by the criminals and asked to send the funds to a different account. One of the hunters actually had his account frozen by his bank and flagged as fraudulent. He then attempted to contact me by email, but the scammers intercepted that email and provided him with another set of wiring instructions to a different bank account in Texas. In Europe they call this type of fraud, “Man in the Middle”.
At no time was I aware that any of this was occurring, as none of the clients’ messages were coming through. It finally came to light when I contacted two of the clients to inquire as to why I had not received their deposits. Once I became aware that multiple bank wires were missing, I immediately sent out a potential fraud alert to my client base and worked with the clients to try to pull the funds back. By this time, the criminals had surely withdrawn the money and disappeared. Fortunately, one of the client’s bank returned the pilfered funds, but in the other cases, the money had disappeared.
The banks should have never delivered the funds to an account where the recipient’s name was not on the account. But how do I hold someone’s foreign bank account responsible?
I filed an FBI Internet Fraud Complaint and to this date have not heard a word. This type of fraud is rampant, and losses occur each year in the hundreds of billions. There is just so much of it that the investigative agencies are overwhelmed to the point that they just let it roll, as they lack the investigative resources to chase every complaint. It appears they expend more efforts in accumulating statistics that they can report, than they do in trying to catch these criminals.
So how did they gain access to my email account? I will most likely never know. Our inboxes are full of phishing email scams seeking to gain access to our personal information. One wrong click and a virus can get through, or, providing any personal information on a seemingly genuine email request can give them access. I have had to update my security measures and no longer send wiring instructions by email. I now either send a photo of the wiring instructions by phone text or WhatsApp or the clients must pay the deposit with a credit card and incur a 3% fee. Most of my domestic clients in the US pay by mailing a check. The US Postal Service is incredibly reliable, and I have never had an issue with mailed deposits.
So how did this all turn out? Although I did nothing wrong and was also defrauded in this scam, the clients were defrauded while doing business with my company. To maintain both my own and my company’s reputations, I had to step up and try to make good with my clients. All the clients moved ahead with the booking of these hunts.
The total sum lost in these scams was $20,000. Only $2,000 dollars was recovered. That is a lot of money, but it could have been worse. Fortunately, the outfitter in Zimbabwe and another outfitter in South Africa also stepped up and helped me with compensating the clients.
I share this with the readers of the African Hunting Gazette to help bring you awareness that email is not secure for sending wiring instructions. There are just too many crooks out there looking to steal your money. To help secure your email accounts, use dual factor authentication. Then any new sign-in to your email account will generate a message to your phone that will require a password to gain access. Nothing is 100% foolproof, but this will make it more difficult for the thieves to gain access to your email account.
I hope this helps you avoid falling victim to one of these scams!
John Martins
Discount African Hunts – an Internet-based International booking agency based in Florida, USA. Formed in 2012 and over 1,700 clients in 53 countries.
