Opinion - News Analysis   

Trek of the wildebeest under threat

Robin McKie

Global warming could put an end to one of Africa's greatest spectacles.

ONE OF the planet's greatest wildlife shows — the annual migration of more than a million wildebeest across east Africa's plains — is facing obliteration.

Scientists have warned that climatic uncertainty now threatens to turn the grasslands through which these great beasts trek each year into an uninhabitable desert. And the drought is blamed squarely on human activities: global warming triggered by carbon dioxide emissions from cars, planes, and other factors. Intensive farming depleting fresh water supplies has also been blamed by climatologists.

"The migration is the greatest wildlife spectacle on Earth, and it would be catastrophic if we were no longer able to experience it," said John Downer, who spent most of last year following the wildebeest on their great trek for a documentary.

The migration — which has occurred without interruption for thousands of years — is one of the most extraordinary movements of animals on the planet. Around 1.5 million of these huge creatures trudge across Kenya and Tanzania in a vast 3,000 km arc.

En route, the animals eat 7,000 tonnes of grass a day and drink enough water to fill five swimming pools. And around this time of the year the migrating animals reach the Serengeti Plain where they calve, triggering the biggest baby boom known. In three weeks, half a million wildebeest will be born.

But scientists fear this great cycle of reproduction could be wiped out if east Africa's drought gets much worse. In the past, other mass migrations, in both Africa and Asia, have been disrupted and eradicated by humans who have fenced off land and diverted rivers and streams.

Ten years ago a million saiga antelopes migrated across central Asia. Now their population, has been reduced to 30,000, linked to habitat loss and the hunting of males for their horns to be used in traditional medicines.

In recent years, droughts have killed up to half a million migrating wildebeest in east Africa. Now scientists fear that another major episode of water loss could trigger so many deaths as to leave no migrating wildebeest in east Africa. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Iajuddin Ahmed's epiphany
Wing it like Beckham
China asserting its place on world stage
Duty and restraint: the hard choice
Liberalisation will not remove caste prejudice
Trek of the wildebeest under threat
There is only a political solution to Iraq
Welcome judgment
Defeats purpose
Assam violence

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu