Wildebeest Migration

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Every year the grassy plains of Tanzania witness the awe-inspiring spectacle of one and a half million grazers moving across the vast Serengeti toward the champagne colored hills of Kenya’s Maasai Mara.

Over ninety percent of the animals in the great migrations are wildebeest with estimates putting the numbers at 1.5 million. The other migrating animals are thousands of zebras and gazelle, including Thompson’s gazelle, eland, and impala all pounding their hooves across the savanna in search of new pastures. The herds migrate in a clockwise fashion over 1,800 miles each year in search of rain-ripened grass while being relentlessly tracked by Africa’s great predators: the lions, leopards, hyenas, and wild African dogs hard on the heels of this abundance of prey.

Each year in late November/early December, after the early rains have nourished the earth, herds of wildebeest arrive on the short-grass plains of the Serengeti. The beginnings of the migration emerge from the grasslands south and east of Seronera, around Ndutu, and including the northern Ngorongoro. Dispersed across these plains, wildebeest and zebra are everywhere, feeding on the fresh grasses. This is also the time when safari camps flourish as visitors flock to watch the spectacle on a daily game drive.

While searching for new food sources, these animals also find time for the annual rut, and an estimated 400,000 wildebeest calves are born during a six-week period at the beginning of each year, usually between late January and mid-March. Sometime around April the herds start to move north, and, by May, the area around Moru Kopjes is hectic, with series of shifting columns, often containing hundreds of thousands of wildebeest, marching north. Around June, the wildebeest migration halts at the Grumeti River whose channels impede their progress. Wildebeest then congregate here in the western corridor until overwhelming density pushes them into the river. In the river, enormous Nile crocodiles snap at the chance for a meal resulting in a dramatic life or death struggle to get to the other side.

September finds the herds spread out across the northern Serengeti where the Mara River provides the migration with its most serious obstacle. It is common to see herds cross the Mara River north on one day and then crossing back south a few days later. By October the herds are migrating again, this time with more cohesion, through western Loliondo and the Serengeti’s Lobo area, returning to the renewed fields of the southern Serengeti by November.