Keeping a Big Cat Diary isn’t as hard as the BBC pretends. You don’t need a multimillion-pound budget, a team of researchers called Gabriella and Sasha or a tame newsreader to see the lions, leopards and cheetahs of Kenya’s Masai Mara.

The best-kept secret in broadcasting is that Big Cat Diary is probably the easiest job in television after presenting the Holiday programme.

How easy? Last week, at the civilised hour of 9.30 in the morning, I found the presenter Simon King filming a particularly lazy bunch of lions known as the Marsh pride. If you’ve been watching the show, you’ll know them: a bevy of blonde single mothers with expensive tastes and a horde of easily bored cubs.

What you won’t know is that the Marsh pride live no more than five minutes from Simon’s bed at the luxury Governors’ Camp, so he’s not exactly pushing himself to find them.

Safari with Alan Carr and Cleo Rocos

The comedian and his companion ignores the guidebook and lives to tell the tale on safari in South Africa

• The smart safari guide

On the elephant trail in South Africa

Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe had only just got the hang of tracking elephants in South Africa when the herd decided to come after her

• A retreat to South Africa's winelands

• South African safari lodge legend

• A walk on the wild side of Kenya

A wild time in Zambia with the kids

David James Smith took his timid but enraptured family on safari in Zambia. Mercifully, they also tracked down a Jacuzzi

• Aaronovitch on a family safari of Zambia

• The world’s top safaris

• Zambia in the wet season

10 classic wildlife tales

Travel news editor Ginny McGrath picks her favourite animal encounters from the Times Online wildlife archive

Related Internet Links

• More close encounters in our Wildlife section

Related Links

• Safari with Alan Carr and Cleo Rocos

As for the cheetahs, they’re thicker on the Mara than labradors on Hampstead Heath, ambling across the game-choked grasslands with the blitheness of supermarket shoppers or lying bloated under croton bushes, panting like spotty Mr Creosotes without the wafer-thin mints.

The annual migration of the wildebeest, the dull-witted ruminant that is the grease on Africa’s circle of life, has turned the Mara into an all-you- can-eat buffet for feline salad-dodgers.

The term migration is somewhat misleading, however, because the word suggests a seasonal journey. Swallows migrate, but wildebeest wander like cloven-footed gypsies, their vast herds following the rains in an unending quest for the sweetest grass. They say that travel broadens the mind, but it’s not true of this horn-headed halfwit, cruelly described as having the face of a grasshopper, the horns of a hartebeest, the tail of a giraffe and the brain of a fly.

They come from nowhere.

One minute the plains are empty, the dew still glistening in the early-morning light. Then you breast a rise and you’re in a world of wildebeest, blackening the grasslands as far as the horizon. They walk, they jog and they dance, blissful and ignorant, heading they know not where for reasons they can’t remember.

From Lookout Hill, the herds look like iron filings drawn by a magnet, a fluid mass that curves, contracts, expands and disperses, like a flock of starlings, but without the discipline. Every now and then, there seems to be a sense of purpose, as though one slightly less bewildered beast has remembered that everyone is supposed to be going to Tanzania for Christmas. The sprawl forms a point, following him downhill towards the lethal crossing points on the deadly Mara River, and the circle of life is rolling again. Then it stops as the head wildebeest is distracted by a wasp, or by the nagging suspicion that he’s not really cut out for a leadership role.

For the cats, it’s the upswing in an annual cycle of boom and bust. The plains are awash with subprime steaks: not as tasty as topi or zebra, but so much easier to catch. Lionesses accustomed to participating in tactical hunting operations that involve perfect positioning, infinite patience and split-second timing now nip out to grab a passing wildebeest with the nonchalance of secretaries popping out for a sandwich.

The hunting is half-hearted yet brutal. A lioness who has watched a herd of perhaps 1,000 oblivious wildebeest saunter past her hiding place yawns, stretches and ambles into the path of the unfortunate last in line. There is no need for stealth as she stands before the horned beast with the inevitability of Death himself. The wildebeest freezes in horror, then flees. She gives chase, and in four bounds has caught up. Her attack is not a pounce but a punch, a devastatingly powerful sideswipe to the ungulate’s haunch that spins it around and drops it scrabbling into the whispering grass. In its death choke, the wildebeest takes four minutes to die. When the light has gone from its eyes, the killer drops the body as though she’s changed her mind and wanders off for a drink.

Times recommends

• The Green Spaces Travel Awards, 2008 - the winners
• Britain's 12 best winter walks
• The insiders' guide to bohemian Paris