The Story of the Serengeti
The Serengeti was the first protected wilderness in East Africa, gazetted to forbid hunting by the British overlords in 1921. There is some speculation today that this was less an environmental gesture than one to punish the previous colonial power, Germany. Germans who were notorious hunters and ivory collectors. Britain assumed governance of the former German colony reluctantly following WWI, and policy was focused principally on what to do with the Germans, not the Africans or the animals.
The first registered tourist was T.J. Simpson of Trenton, New Jersey, who in June, 1921, drove his Model T-Ford across the Serengeti plains, and the American fascination with the Serengeti has never ended.
Just under 5,000 sq. miles the Serengeti is contiguous with the Ngorongoro Conservation Authority to the south and Kenya’s Maasai Mara to the north, a continuously protected wilderness of nearly 8,000 sq. miles. And unlike so much of East African wilderness, much of this terrain could provide a range of good farming opportunities, so it is tourism alone that has saved it from development.
The southern plains that begin immediately north of Ngorongoro Crater extend approximately 60 miles north and is what we generally think of when we refer to the “Serengeti.” The grass grows on top of sediment formed from an ancient lake and provides the nutrition for the largest collection of big mammals left on earth. Further north in Kenya the plains rise and fall and become interspersed with woodlands and rivers. To the west are the strikingly beautiful Moru Kopjes. Kopjes are rocky outcrops or isotherms some dated to almost 4 billion years old. And to the east are the nearly impenetrable Loliondo mountain badlands. Altogether this is one of the most diverse and extensive biosystems in the world. It is among the most studied, most revered and most visited on earth.
Our focus on the great wildebeest migration reflects the Serengeti’s single greatest attraction. Great animal migrations are disappearing, and in Africa the great veterinary fences continuing to be constructed in Botswana have disrupted the last great such migration in the south. Oil drilling in the arctic likely will obstruct the Porcupine caribou herd and all that remains of our own Great Plains bison are great movies. But the Serengeti’s wildebeest migration has actually improved during our life time. There are three times as many animals involved in the migration, today, as when Peter Beard wrote his book, The End of the Game , in 1979. The reason for this is tourism, and it has resulted in new problems, not least of which is the growing conflict with peripheral human settlements and the probable loss of less robust species. And this great migration is now threatened by the Tanzanian government’s commitment to building a road right through the northern neck of the park, virtually the midway point in the great migration.
The annual migration is truly fascinating and remarkably exciting. We generally think of it as beginning at the end of the year, just as the rains in northern Tanzania’s single long rainy season begin. The rains bring the nutrient grasses and the pregnant wildebeest recongregate to feast. Rains continue with only a minor let up in February right through May. Calves are dropped in February with the ensuing three months a food fest as they develop the strength for the coming trek north. When the rains stop in June and the veld dries up, the herds panic. They form tight files that run north towards where the rain lingers. In the far north of the ecosystem, in Kenya’s Mara, it rains through September. But moving north the plains rise and become more wooded and the grasslands are less nutritious. So whenever an anomalous period of weather develops and rains fall again on the southern plains, the herds actually turn back. This to-and-fro causes some confusion from year to year, but the pattern over the eons is quite clear.
By October it rains nowhere, not even in the Mara, and the entire system is a dustbowl. Grass is hard to find anywhere, and unlike the frantic northern migration, the wildebeest now amble slowly south through a parched landscape for seemingly no good reason. But inevitably they reach the southern plains just as the new rains begin.
