The Bay's Creek origin story begins on the East African savannah. Living in Kenya for three years as a youth ignited a fascination for wild places and the earth's wonders, both in wildlife and geography. Fortunate enough to spend many weekends and trips in a bouncy old van, watching my dad navigate back roads, wildlife, and his camera. We lived there long enough for the landscape to get in my soul. The lions at distance. The dust rising behind a moving herd. The specific quality of light in the late afternoon over open grass. That experience didn't create a photographer immediately. It created a fascination with the earth's wonders that eventually demanded one.
The Maasai Mara is one of the locations where that fascination was formed. Every year, the largest herd movement of animals on the planet follows an ancient clockwise route — wildebeest calving in Tanzania's Serengeti near the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, then pushing north through the Serengeti and across into Kenya's Maasai Mara before returning south again. The herds include roughly 1.3 million blue wildebeest, 200,000 zebras, half a million Thomson's gazelles, and tens of thousands of topi and eland. The movement is governed entirely by rainfall patterns — instinct tracking the grass and fight for survival.
Peak numbers arrive in the Mara between August and September, when dramatic Mara River crossings draw lions, leopards, and Nile crocodiles into concentrated predator-prey encounters that exist nowhere else at this scale. But the Mara is not only a migration corridor. It is a fully functioning savannah ecosystem — dry season concentrating animals around permanent water, wet season scattering herds across plains of regenerating grass, the cycle preventing overgrazing and sustaining the landscape that makes the migration possible in the first place.
I'll explore again one day, with goals to capture that beauty and wild landscape with my own lens.
All current pictures of Kenya are from my father, William Burritt. Images are digitized from old slides as best as possible at the time years ago. More will be added as possible. I was lucky kid to have an exploring dad that introduced me to photography and an artist mother who fell in love with Kenya and its wild beauty.
Forever thankful for this life-shaping experience.
