The release: Rain, glorious rain. Wildebeest dot the plains of the Greater Mara, enjoying grazing nourished by the storms
PAUL GOLDSTEIN f KICHECHE CAMPS, FROM THE BOOK ‘MAGIC MARA’
Few things have more impact on animal movement than climate. It can be as simple as cattle being herded from winter barn to spring pasture, or wildlife roaming up and down a mountain depending on the season. Climate gets things moving. Just as it triggered the first human migrations out of Africa, climate change is now the catalyst for a modern-day exodus: people and wildlife escaping desiccated lands and warming seas. Migration, escape, flight… whatever you call it, this ancient behaviour is a lifesaving response to environmental change. The wildebeest and zebra of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem are so finely attuned to climate that their lives literally revolve around the annual cycle of rains that sweep the great savannahs of southwest Kenya and northern Tanzania. The vast herds of the Great Migration respond instinctively to unseen, yet lifegiving rains, trekking clockwise through the Masai Mara and Serengeti in a never ending quest for sweet, fresh grass.
Such is their pact with the weather gods that nothing will stop the two million wildebeest and plains zebra that form the main contingent of the Great Migration. Not even a crocodile-infested river. Heads bowed, trudging doggedly in single-file columns — spilling across the plains like rivulets of treacle — the herds inevitably reach the banks of the Mara or Grumeti Rivers. There they hesitate, coalescing into a seething, snorting mass: a super-organism with a single, pressing urge to cross. But they sense the danger — not just crocodiles, but leg-snatching rapids; lions waiting in ambush on the far side.