About Us
Mpala Live! gives you a round-the-clock look at the lives of elephants, lions, zebras, giraffes, hippos, birds, and other animals in a fascinating swath of African landscape. Our webcams let you visually enter this realm. The Hippo Pool cameras, for instance, take you to a watering hole that attracts hippos, monkeys, zebras, giraffe, scores of bird species, and the occasional crocodile.
But there’s more to Mpala Live! than the sights and sounds brought to you by the LIVE CAM. In STORIES FROM THE BUSH, you can follow scientists as they study relationships among humans, animals, and the ecosystem they share.
The FIELD GUIDE introduces you to Mpala’s animals, from aardvarks to zebras, from African spoonbills to yellow-necked spurfowls. You’ll find out about their behavior, their diet, and how their societies work.
The CLASSROOM especially welcomes teachers, offering them curricula keyed to Mpala’s flora and fauna as well as a school’s local environment. Parents and school kids will also enjoy this ultimate field trip, where they get close-up views of a Kenyan wildlife ecosystem.
Soon to come: CITIZEN SCIENTIST and INTERACTIVE MAP.
CITIZEN SCIENTIST is a crowd-sourced research platform that will allow you to study African wildlife on your home computer, cell phone, tablet, or TV screen. You will be able to log-in and note what is going on at the hippo pool. Your observations will provide Mpala researchers with additional data for their 24/7 record of activity at the pool.
INTERACTIVE MAP will guide you through Mpala, showing the sites of research projects and spotlighting key features of a place where wildlife and human beings coexist.
To stay in touch with Mpala and its upcoming features, go to KEEP ME INFORMED.
Mpala Live! takes you to Kenya’s Laikipia County, a vast area that is home to wildlife and private and community ranches, where herds of cattle, sheep, and camels graze amid wild animals. Nearly 7,000 elephants roam Laikipia, a rolling grassland dotted with shrubs and Acacia trees. In Laikipia’s skies fly 1,133 species of birds—48 percent of all bird species recorded in Kenya.
In the center of Laikipia, watched over by Mount Kenya, is a 77-square-mile (200 km2) mix of wild land and ranch land called Mpala. Since 1994 the Mpala Research Centre has been dedicated to learning how wildlife and human beings can manage to live together in ways beneficial to both. The Centre is a partnership among Princeton University, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museums of Kenya, the Kenya Wildlife Service, and the Mpala Wildlife Foundation.