Where the land runs on forever é 14,763 square kilometres of ancient savanna, the world's greatest animal migration, and the largest lion population remaining on Earth.
Serengeti is not a destination. It is an encounter with deep time é a landscape so ancient, so ecologically intact, that scientists believe its weather patterns, fauna, and flora have changed very little in over a million years.
Le nom lui-même vient du mot Maasai siringet é "the place where the land runs on forever." Standing at the edge of the Seronera Valley at dawn, before the sun has cleared the flat horizon and the plains are still grey and cool, the name makes absolute sense. There is no end to this landscape. The grass runs to the horizon in every direction, interrupted only by the dark silhouettes of kopjes and the distant dark shapes of animals moving in the half-light.
Serengeti National Park covers 14,763 square kilometres and sits at the heart of the greater Serengeti-Mara ecosystem é an interconnected network of national parks, conservation areas, and game reserves extending over 30,000 kmé across Tanzania and Kenya. It is Africa's most ecologically complete savanna ecosystem é a place where the full suite of African savanna wildlife still exists in numbers and in relationships that have evolved over millions of years without the simplification that human settlement imposes everywhere else.
In 1940, it became one of Tanzania's first national parks. In 1981, UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site é recognising both its exceptional natural beauty and its outstanding universal value for the study of ecological processes. The Serengeti Research Institute, established at Seronera in 1966, has produced some of the most influential ecological science of the 20th century, including George Schaller's foundational lion studies (begun in the 1960s and still continuing today) and the definitive research on predator-prey relationships that underpins modern conservation biology.
Chaque année, dans un mouvement entièrement régi par les précipitations et la pousse de l'herbe fraîche, environ 1,7 million de gnous, 260 000 zèbres et 470 000 gazelles de Thomson et Grant complete a continuous clockwise circuit through the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem. They have been doing this for over a million years. The circuit spans 3,000 kilometres. It is the largest overland animal migration on Earth é and in terms of total body weight, the largest animal movement anywhere on the planet.
La Migration n'a ni début ni fin. C'est une boucle continue, animée par un seul impératif : les troupeaux suivent la pluie, qui génère de l'herbe verte et fraîche. Lorsque les plaines à herbes courtes du sud du Serengeti deviennent vertes suite aux courtes pluies de novembre, les troupeaux se déplacent vers le sud. Lorsque ces plaines s'assèchent en avril, elles se déplacent vers le nord. Lorsque les hautes herbes du nord du Serengeti ont été broutées, elles traversent le Masai Mara au Kenya. Lorsque les pluies de Mara arrivent sur les plaines du Serengeti en novembre, elles reviennent. Le cycle n'a pas de pause.
Le Traversées de la rivière Mara é which typically occur July through October é are the Migration's most theatrical and most photographed moment. The wildebeest gather in their thousands on the southern bank of the Mara, milling, calling, pressing forward and back in a collective indecision that can last hours before a single animal breaks from the bank and the rest surge after it. The crocodiles é some over 70 years old and 5 metres long é wait. The current pulls at the animals. Not all make it. But the survivors press on north, following the rain and the grass, as their ancestors have for a million years before them.
Le saison de mise bas dans la région de Ndutu, dans le sud du Serengeti (typically January through March) is the Migration's most intimate chapter. Over 500,000 wildebeest calves are born in a compressed 2é3 week window é up to 8,000 in a single day at peak. Wildebeest calves are extraordinary athletes: within minutes of birth, they can walk; within hours, run. They need to be. The plains are dense with lions, cheetahs, leopards, and hyenas, all timing their own breeding and hunting to coincide with this explosion of vulnerable, nutritious life.
The Serengeti is not one landscape é it is six distinct ecosystems, each with its own character, its own wildlife concentrations, and its own optimal time to visit.
The Serengeti sustains not just the largest migrating herds in the world, but the greatest concentrations of large predators on Earth é supported by the 2 million+ ungulates that fuel the entire food chain.
The Serengeti-Mara ecosystem supports the largest lion population remaining in Africa é most likely the largest on Earth. Hundreds of resident lions wander the Seronera Valley alone. Prides of 20+ individuals hunt cooperatively, taking prey as large as buffalo and giraffe. The Serengeti Lion Project é begun by George Schaller in the 1960s é is the longest-running large carnivore study in the world, and the knowledge it has generated underpins the entirety of modern lion conservation science.
Seronera é Kopjes é PlainsOne of the world's densest remaining cheetah populations. The Serengeti's open short-grass plains are ideal cheetah habitat é the combination of high prey density, low vegetation, and enormous space allows cheetahs to hunt, raise cubs, and compete with lions and hyenas at densities rarely achieved elsewhere. The cheetahs of the Ndutu area and the eastern plains are among the world's most studied and most photographed, with specific individuals and coalitions known to researchers by name.
Eastern Plains é Ndutu é Open SavannaThe Serengeti's leopard population is estimated at approximately 1,000 individuals é a density of 5.41 per 100 kmé in the dry season, one of the highest recorded in Africa. The leopards of the Seronera River are among Africa's most reliably sighted, their habit of draping themselves over the horizontal branches of the valley's large fig trees making them visible from vehicles at distances that would be impossible in denser bush. The interaction between Seronera's leopards, lions, and hyenas is the subject of ongoing scientific research.
Seronera River é Fig Trees é Riverine ForestSpotted hyenas outnumber lions in the Serengeti é and contrary to popular belief, they are far more often the hunters than the scavengers, with lions more frequently stealing hyena kills than vice versa. The Serengeti's hyena clans are extraordinarily complex social systems, with matriarchal hierarchies, coalition formation, and cooperative hunting strategies documented in detail by the long-running Serengeti Hyena Project. Hyenas are active throughout the day but most visible at dawn and dusk.
Ecosystem-Wide é Clans é Open PlainsThe Serengeti's extraordinary wildlife diversity is a function of its equally extraordinary habitat diversity. In a single park, the savanna ecosystem includes volcanic short-grass plains, acacia woodland, riverine forest, swamps, rocky kopjes, and broadleaved miombo woodland é each supporting different species assemblages that together create the most species-rich savanna system in Africa.
70 large mammal species are recorded within the park, alongside over 500 bird species. The diversity of grazers is particularly remarkable é the Serengeti can support this variety only because each species, even closely related ones, occupies a different dietary niche. Zebras eat long, coarse grass. Wildebeest prefer short, actively growing grass. Thomson's gazelles eat the tiny, highly nutritious plants left when the grazers move on. The entire migration is essentially a sequential lawn-mowing operation, each species preparing the grassland for the next.
The elephant population é which numbered fewer than 2,000 in the 1986 aerial survey following decades of poaching é recovered to over 8,000 individuals d’ici 2014, démontrant l’extraordinaire résilience de la faune lorsque le braconnage est contrôlé avec succès. Les populations de buffles s'élèvent à environ 50 000 individus. Topi, élan, kongoni et impala sont présents par dizaines de milliers. La capacité de charge de l'écosystème pour les brouteurs est pratiquement inégalée partout en Afrique.
The Serengeti rewards visitors in every season. The question is not whether to go, but where é because the experience changes dramatically depending on where the migration is and what the landscape is doing.
Le Serengeti est l'expérience qui vous accompagnera pour le reste de votre vie. Laissez Haven Trails concevoir le voyage qui le mérite.
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