The long rains failed over most of the country, certainly April and May were driest for the past twenty years in the Mara. 

The April rains appear to have failed and unless we see any substantial rain in May we can expect a severe drought – we can expect intermittent storms between June and November, but they will probably be insufficient for significant grass growth. 

The rains started on the 12th – several days of all night rain, followed by cool, overcast days. 

There was sufficient rain through the first week to maintain grass growth. 

Two weeks of scattered showers and thunderstorms kept the Triangle green for most of December.  

A total of 434 people were arrested by our rangers in 2016 – even if we remove the 115 people arrested for illegal logging and charcoal burning we still broke the record, set last year, of 318 arrests. 

It was mainly dry until the last week of November.  Since then we have had good, widespread rain. 

The rains continued through the first week of October and, a apart from a few showers, it dried out for the remainder of the month. 

We started getting reasonable rain in mid-September, enough to put some water in the watercourses and turn the grass green. 

August was again exceptionally dry – only three days of light rain that did nothing to the grass.

There were only three local and isolated thunderstorms in the Triangle during July – one of the driest months in the past 15 years.

We had a few days of heavy, sustained and widespread rain from the 20th, messing up all the work we done on the roads near Little Governors. 

The rains continued throughout May, with some exceptional storms and all-night rains. 

The rains started on the 1st,  with one or two very heavy storms before they tailed off again after a week. 

March was, for the most part, dry – with a few showers.  This enabled us to burn the planned block with an ideal, slow, cool burn that did not damage the thickets.

We had a week of rain at the beginning of the month.  The last storm did a lot of damage, just when we though we had weathered the worst. 

The rains returned on the 10th and continued for two weeks before tailing off. 

The rains continued until Christmas, with some major storms flooding extensive areas of the Triangle and washing away some of the road surfaces. 

There was a lot of rain throughout November, filling all the watercourses and flooding parts of the Triangle. 

The dry weather, interspersed with showers, continued through to the middle of October.