The Serengeti to the Masai Mara: How to watch the wildest show on Earth

The annual 700-mile trek of 2 million wildebeest, gazelle, and zebra is coming to Twitter and YouTube. 

|
Thomas Mukoya/Reuters/File
A hippopotamus opens its mouth as wildebeests cross the Mara river during a migration in the Masai Mara game reserve, 165 miles southwest of capital Nairobi, August 25, 2010. The migration is the world's greatest wildlife spectacle taking place between the open plains of the Serengeti and the Masai Mara as the animals migrate to greener pastures as the seasons change and the circle of life and death continues.

It is perhaps the wildest show on Earth. Each year about a million wildebeest, half a million gazelle, and 200,000 zebra journey from the Serengeti park in Tanzania to the Masai Mara reserve in Kenya, following a clockwise rotation dictated by rainfall and grazing land.

The wild display will be broadcast live on the web starting Tuesday Sept. 29 and ending Oct. 5, and include expert commentary in an effort by Kenya to promote tourism, its most vital ecosystem being the Masai Mara reserve. Broadcasts of 10 to 20 minutes will run daily on the periscope app on Twitter. Viewers will need to register on herdtracker, the website of app developers.

"Serengeti-Mara ecosystems [are] considered to be perhaps the last of the ecosystems … in which … human impact is less than 5 percent," said professor Karim Hirji, former director of the Serengeti Wildlife Research Center in an interview with ABC News.

The annual migration – 700 miles round trip – is quite literally the circle of life.

"Without the migration, it's harder to conceive Serengeti-Mara being what it is today," Mr. Hirji added. "Everything else survives within that migration – the predators and so on the vegetation."

The drama on the plains is what perpetuates the ecosystem: For the 2 million herbivores that make the journey, including the birth of some 300,000 wildebeest calves, scores inevitably fall prey to the thousands of waiting crocodiles in the Mara river, and after successful passage through the Serengeti are then faced with the world’s highest concentrations of lions and other carnivores in the Masai Mara, drawing thousands of tourists on safari, The Guardian reports.

The broadcasts will also be available on YouTube and on the Herd Tracker Live website. Notifications on schedules will be offered on the @herdtracker and @makeitkenya handles.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to The Serengeti to the Masai Mara: How to watch the wildest show on Earth
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0929/The-Serengeti-to-the-Masai-Mara-How-to-watch-the-wildest-show-on-Earth
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe