Serengeti, Tanzania

It is estimated that wildebeests will deliver new calves in the wilderness of Serengeti plains at the rate of 8,000 newborns a day this season.

Last month, more than 16,500 tourists, among them 5,800 domestic visitors, visited the national park to view the wonders of the wildebeests’ calving event.

The event also attracted wildlife researchers and zoological scientists.

Park conservator William Mwakilema last week described the event as fantastic as it brings people to see miracles in the World Heritage Site of Serengeti. “It is a spectacular sight.

This is the only place on earth where nearly two million herbivores are giving birth at the same time in what is known as synchronised calving,” he said.

“What I am seeing here is amazing and despite the pictures taken, many people back home may not believe it when I tell them about this important story,” Belgium tourist Robert Joseph said.

The wildebeests’ calving season is expected to last the next five weeks at the end of which nearly 500,000 calves will be born into Tanzania’s second largest national park.

More enthralling, according to other tourists who are witnessing the event, the animals do not have to lie down but can deliver their babies as they move about.

Also, once the calves drop from the wombs, they start hopping about after two or three minutes

“Normally, February is a low tourism season but we are recording nearly 17,000 visitors in just one month.

It goes to show how the world’s one and only synchronised calving is creating great interest,” said Mr Paschal Shelutete, public relations manager of Tanzania’s national parks.

According to Serengeti park senior warden, Mr Godson Kimaro, the plains attract over 350,000 tourists every year.

The peak tourism season is usually between the months of June and September when the north-bound great migration of the ungulates takes place.

But most of the half-a-million newborn wildebeests calves may not survive the jungle — which is full of hyenas, lions and leopards, not to mention wolves, all of which should be happy to chew the soft and tender bones of the young herbivores. 

Mr Seth Mihayo, the Tourism Conservator at the park said half of the newborn wildebeests are likely to die from predator attacks, drowning in the giant Mara River or succumbing to the hostile elements that accompany the ungulates 1,000 kilometers’ annual migration.

”But it is the way of mother nature, balancing the ecosystem because the 2010 animals’ census indicated that there were 1.5 million wildebeests.

“This means an increase of 500,000 ungulates every year could overwhelm the park, therefore natural selection trims them to manageable size,” said Mr Mihayo. Xinhua

Source: Sunday Nation Newspaper