Serengeti National Park

The park was established in 1951 and covers 14,763 square kilometers of some of the best grasslands in Africa, as well as extensive acacia wooded savannah. With elevations ranging from 920 to 1,850 meters, the park extends 160 km southeast of the shores of Lake Victoria and, in its eastern part, 160 km south of the Kenya-Tanzania border. It is along the “western corridor” to Lake Victoria that many of the park’s animals migrate. The area is home to nearly 1,300,000 wildebeest, 60,000 zebra, 150,000 gazelle and many other animals. During the wet season, from November to May, the herds graze on the plains in the southeast of the park. In late May or June, a large group moves west into the park’s wooded savannah and then north into the grasslands just over the Kenya-Tanzania border, an area known as the Mara (Masai Mara National Reserve). Another group migrates directly north. The herds return to the southeastern plains of the park in November, at the end of the dry season.

In addition to more than 35 species of plains animals, there are some 3,000 lions and large numbers of spotted hyenas, leopards, rhinos, hippos, giraffes, cheetahs and baboons. Crocodiles inhabit the swamps near the Mara River. More than 350 species of birds, including ostriches, vultures and flamingos, have also been recorded.

Elephants, which were not present in the Serengeti 30 years ago, entered the park as human populations and agricultural developments increased outside its borders; the local elephant population is estimated at some 1,360 individuals. The last wild dogs in the Serengeti disappeared in 1991, but there are about 30,000 domestic dogs in the area; it is possible that unvaccinated domestic dogs transmitted rabies to the wild dogs, resulting in their local extinction. An outbreak of distemper killed nearly one-third of the region’s lions in 1994. The slaughter of elephants for their ivory tusks, the slaughter of the now nearly extinct black rhino for its horn, and the poaching of game for meat – estimated at 200,000 per year – are major threats.

The first systematic study of wildlife populations in the region was undertaken by German zoologist Bernhard Grzimek in the late 1950s. The park’s headquarters is located near its center, in Seronera, where the Seronera Wildlife Research Centre (established in 1962 as the Serengeti Research Institute) is also located.