The World's Biggest Animal Migration
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John Ashworth
Sep 9, 2025, 1:23:47 AMSep 9
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If you have access to the WSJ, it's worth looking at the online
article as it has superb photographs of the wildlife.
BEGIN
This is the World's Biggest Animal Migration—and Few Outsiders Have Seen It
Six million antelope storm through a pocket of Africa that’s nearly
impossible to get to, but the Journal caught them on camera
By Michael M. Phillips | Photographs and Videos by Brent Stirton/Getty
Images for WSJ | Design and Illustrations by Annie Ng
Wall Street Journal
Sept. 6, 2025
GADIANG, South Sudan—Deep in the hinterlands of this East African
country is one of the greatest natural events you’ll never see.
Six million antelope swarm across an area the size of Illinois, a mass
movement of mammals triple the size of the Serengeti wildebeest trek,
the go-to migration for TV nature shows. The animals storm through
sparse forests and open savannah, trickles of antelope merging to
become streams, streams swelling and spreading until the landscape is
filled with thundering rivers of white-eared kob, tiang, Mongalla
gazelle and Bohor reedbuck. A single herd can number 100,000 antelope,
or more.
“This is the greatest migration of large fauna in the world, including
the oceans,” says renowned naturalist Mike Fay, who is conducting an
antelope head-count in South Sudan. “The entire planet should be
amazed that this exists.”
Yet the Great Nile Migration remains virtually unknown to outsiders
and preposterously difficult to witness. Would-be visitors have to
travel to a country that’s been engulfed in on-again-off-again war for
decades, and is on again. Then there’s the terrain. The animals move
through a landscape with virtually no roads, not even rough safari
tracks, and are easily viewable only from helicopters or slow-flying
ultralight aircraft.
African Parks, the Johannesburg-based conservation group that manages
natural areas on behalf of South Sudan’s government, allowed The Wall
Street Journal access to the 58,000-square-mile wilderness on the
eastern bank of the White Nile.
It’s a migration as old as time, but, conservationists fear, one that
might not last much longer.
Although scientists and, of course, locals have known about the
migration for years, only recently have researchers understood its
staggering dimensions. In 2023, African Parks conducted an aerial
survey revealing the movement included some 5.1 million white-eared
kob, which generally move in a U shape in and around Boma National
Park, sometimes crossing into Ethiopia’s Gambella National Park.
The animals stop to eat and breed, but they’re on the move much of the
year. The estimated total migration comes to nearly six million
animals. By contrast, roughly two million blue wildebeest and common
zebra traverse the Serengeti between Tanzania and Kenya.
Using antelope tracking collars, researchers have shown the migration
routes to be complex, partly based on flooding and human activity.
Many white-eared kob spend the dry season (around November to March)
in the northern part of their range, then head south for the wet
season (April to October).
African Parks teams, armed with airplane-mounted cameras, are
conducting a new survey in South Sudan to double-check their findings.
The teams fly designated patterns across the landscape, snapping some
320,000 aerial photographs to be analyzed by hand and with artificial
intelligence. AI isn’t great at identifying antelope species, but it
can eliminate photos in which no animals appear, speeding the work of
human counters.
African Parks and the South Sudanese government would like to develop
ecotourism around the migration, but have so far been frustrated.
African Parks built a small tented safari camp, but the first clients
to book canceled after fighting broke out earlier this year between
political factions in the north of the country.
South Sudanese rebels fought for decades to break away from Sudan. The
South, mostly animist and Christian, finally won independence from the
largely Muslim North in 2011, but quickly descended into civil war
along ethnic lines. The war ended in 2020, but this year’s fighting
suggests stability remains a distant hope.
Scientists aren’t sure why the herds move as they do. They assume the
antelope are driven by the quest for grass, water and breeding
grounds.
But researchers are confident the animals try to avoid people, and
that has helped them survive.
Enormous swaths of the flatlands in and around Badingilo National Park
flood during rainy season. The animals don’t mind, but the floods make
the area unappealing for human settlement. Around the remote Jwam
Swamp, dry-season huts, abandoned by residents during the rains,
protrude like small islands from the floodwaters.
The interethnic violence that plagues South Sudan has also, to a
degree, helped protect the migration.
Among the region’s ethnic groups, the heavily armed Murle people in
and around Boma National Park are known for stealing cattle and
children from the Dinka and Anuak. Fighting is a way of life for Murle
men, who divide themselves into age sets. Younger men gain status by
taking on the men above them, with sticks and AK-47s, sometimes with
lethal effect. Their torsos sometimes bear decorative scars resembling
assault rifles.
“We don’t know why the Murle carry out criminal activities,” says Oman
Obel Cham, 80, an Anuak elder who had two grandchildren killed and two
others abducted by Murle raiders.
The Murle are so intimidating that other ethnic groups keep their
distance to the extent possible. That has created a sort of
no-man’s-land both in the parks and the places in between.
“You’ve got this massive space that has allowed the migration to
flourish,” says John Vogel, manager of Badingilo park.
African Parks, which has a 10-year park-management agreement, works
hand-in-hand with government wildlife rangers. But the
conservationists go light on law enforcement, believing instead their
best chance of protecting the migration is by convincing villagers to
hunt what they need, not what they can kill.
“At the end of the day it’s the people’s animals,” says Megan Claase,
conservation manager for African Parks. “If you manage it, you could
eat forever.”
With war, however, have come guns, and the temptation to poach is
strong. Increasingly, hunters armed with military-grade weapons have
been mowing down entire herds of antelope and just taking what they
can carry to market on motorcycles.
“They don’t know that shooting like that the animals will be gone,”
says Simon Kulugit Amor, a Murle who serves as liaison between his
kinsmen and park managers.
In a single month this year, African Parks counted 14,000 antelope
carcasses passing through the town of Bor, where each animal sells for
about $50, a vast amount to a poor rural family. Around Boma National
Park, trucks from Ethiopia bring soap, vegetable oil, clothes and
other goods. Young Anuak men, who hunt with dogs, make kob jerky to
swap for such necessities.
Officials warn that even huge herds can disappear quickly if hunting
isn’t managed. Forty years ago, they point out, Boma National Park was
home to 93,000 zebra. Today there are few, perhaps none.
South Sudan’s main export is oil, and the government is encouraging
further development in a bloc that includes parts of Badingilo
National Park. Drilling requires roads, another threat to the
antelope.
Animals can cross roads, says Claase, the conservation manager. But
roads open the way for commercial hunters. And roadside villages pop
up that can keep the antelope from completing their appointed rounds.
In 1948, Denis Zaphiro, a major in the colonial Sudan Defense Force,
witnessed the migration as far south as the Loelli plains, near the
Kenyan border. In notes published in the Sudan Wild Life and Sport
journal, he described the herds as “one of the strangest and most awe
inspiring spectacles in Africa.”
Zaphiro, who later served as Ernest Hemingway’s hunting guide, tallied
3,000 tiang crowding a single airstrip. He gave up counting a larger
herd out of “sheer fatigue.”
“The migration has proved itself too vast a thing to be comprehended
clearly and as a whole by a single, casual observer,” Zaphiro wrote.
The migration, however, no longer reaches Loelli. Says Claase: “It’s
already starting to degrade.”
Still, like Zaphiro 75 years ago, Claase struggles for superlatives
when describing the first time she saw the migrating herds from a
two-seat ultralight aircraft, aptly named a Savannah.
“It was just crazy,” she says. “It just doesn’t stop. It’s just such
huge numbers. It’s actually hard to conceptualize because you’re just
flying over and over and over it, and it just keeps going. And it’s
hard to realize that each of those things is an animal. It’s just
mind-blowing.”
https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/worlds-biggest-animal-migration-great-nile-b67e3c0b
END
______________________
John Ashworth
ashwor...@gmail.com
+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile, WhatsApp and Signal)
PO Box 403 - 00206, Kiserian, Kenya
article as it has superb photographs of the wildlife.
BEGIN
This is the World's Biggest Animal Migration—and Few Outsiders Have Seen It
Six million antelope storm through a pocket of Africa that’s nearly
impossible to get to, but the Journal caught them on camera
By Michael M. Phillips | Photographs and Videos by Brent Stirton/Getty
Images for WSJ | Design and Illustrations by Annie Ng
Wall Street Journal
Sept. 6, 2025
GADIANG, South Sudan—Deep in the hinterlands of this East African
country is one of the greatest natural events you’ll never see.
Six million antelope swarm across an area the size of Illinois, a mass
movement of mammals triple the size of the Serengeti wildebeest trek,
the go-to migration for TV nature shows. The animals storm through
sparse forests and open savannah, trickles of antelope merging to
become streams, streams swelling and spreading until the landscape is
filled with thundering rivers of white-eared kob, tiang, Mongalla
gazelle and Bohor reedbuck. A single herd can number 100,000 antelope,
or more.
“This is the greatest migration of large fauna in the world, including
the oceans,” says renowned naturalist Mike Fay, who is conducting an
antelope head-count in South Sudan. “The entire planet should be
amazed that this exists.”
Yet the Great Nile Migration remains virtually unknown to outsiders
and preposterously difficult to witness. Would-be visitors have to
travel to a country that’s been engulfed in on-again-off-again war for
decades, and is on again. Then there’s the terrain. The animals move
through a landscape with virtually no roads, not even rough safari
tracks, and are easily viewable only from helicopters or slow-flying
ultralight aircraft.
African Parks, the Johannesburg-based conservation group that manages
natural areas on behalf of South Sudan’s government, allowed The Wall
Street Journal access to the 58,000-square-mile wilderness on the
eastern bank of the White Nile.
It’s a migration as old as time, but, conservationists fear, one that
might not last much longer.
Although scientists and, of course, locals have known about the
migration for years, only recently have researchers understood its
staggering dimensions. In 2023, African Parks conducted an aerial
survey revealing the movement included some 5.1 million white-eared
kob, which generally move in a U shape in and around Boma National
Park, sometimes crossing into Ethiopia’s Gambella National Park.
The animals stop to eat and breed, but they’re on the move much of the
year. The estimated total migration comes to nearly six million
animals. By contrast, roughly two million blue wildebeest and common
zebra traverse the Serengeti between Tanzania and Kenya.
Using antelope tracking collars, researchers have shown the migration
routes to be complex, partly based on flooding and human activity.
Many white-eared kob spend the dry season (around November to March)
in the northern part of their range, then head south for the wet
season (April to October).
African Parks teams, armed with airplane-mounted cameras, are
conducting a new survey in South Sudan to double-check their findings.
The teams fly designated patterns across the landscape, snapping some
320,000 aerial photographs to be analyzed by hand and with artificial
intelligence. AI isn’t great at identifying antelope species, but it
can eliminate photos in which no animals appear, speeding the work of
human counters.
African Parks and the South Sudanese government would like to develop
ecotourism around the migration, but have so far been frustrated.
African Parks built a small tented safari camp, but the first clients
to book canceled after fighting broke out earlier this year between
political factions in the north of the country.
South Sudanese rebels fought for decades to break away from Sudan. The
South, mostly animist and Christian, finally won independence from the
largely Muslim North in 2011, but quickly descended into civil war
along ethnic lines. The war ended in 2020, but this year’s fighting
suggests stability remains a distant hope.
Scientists aren’t sure why the herds move as they do. They assume the
antelope are driven by the quest for grass, water and breeding
grounds.
But researchers are confident the animals try to avoid people, and
that has helped them survive.
Enormous swaths of the flatlands in and around Badingilo National Park
flood during rainy season. The animals don’t mind, but the floods make
the area unappealing for human settlement. Around the remote Jwam
Swamp, dry-season huts, abandoned by residents during the rains,
protrude like small islands from the floodwaters.
The interethnic violence that plagues South Sudan has also, to a
degree, helped protect the migration.
Among the region’s ethnic groups, the heavily armed Murle people in
and around Boma National Park are known for stealing cattle and
children from the Dinka and Anuak. Fighting is a way of life for Murle
men, who divide themselves into age sets. Younger men gain status by
taking on the men above them, with sticks and AK-47s, sometimes with
lethal effect. Their torsos sometimes bear decorative scars resembling
assault rifles.
“We don’t know why the Murle carry out criminal activities,” says Oman
Obel Cham, 80, an Anuak elder who had two grandchildren killed and two
others abducted by Murle raiders.
The Murle are so intimidating that other ethnic groups keep their
distance to the extent possible. That has created a sort of
no-man’s-land both in the parks and the places in between.
“You’ve got this massive space that has allowed the migration to
flourish,” says John Vogel, manager of Badingilo park.
African Parks, which has a 10-year park-management agreement, works
hand-in-hand with government wildlife rangers. But the
conservationists go light on law enforcement, believing instead their
best chance of protecting the migration is by convincing villagers to
hunt what they need, not what they can kill.
“At the end of the day it’s the people’s animals,” says Megan Claase,
conservation manager for African Parks. “If you manage it, you could
eat forever.”
With war, however, have come guns, and the temptation to poach is
strong. Increasingly, hunters armed with military-grade weapons have
been mowing down entire herds of antelope and just taking what they
can carry to market on motorcycles.
“They don’t know that shooting like that the animals will be gone,”
says Simon Kulugit Amor, a Murle who serves as liaison between his
kinsmen and park managers.
In a single month this year, African Parks counted 14,000 antelope
carcasses passing through the town of Bor, where each animal sells for
about $50, a vast amount to a poor rural family. Around Boma National
Park, trucks from Ethiopia bring soap, vegetable oil, clothes and
other goods. Young Anuak men, who hunt with dogs, make kob jerky to
swap for such necessities.
Officials warn that even huge herds can disappear quickly if hunting
isn’t managed. Forty years ago, they point out, Boma National Park was
home to 93,000 zebra. Today there are few, perhaps none.
South Sudan’s main export is oil, and the government is encouraging
further development in a bloc that includes parts of Badingilo
National Park. Drilling requires roads, another threat to the
antelope.
Animals can cross roads, says Claase, the conservation manager. But
roads open the way for commercial hunters. And roadside villages pop
up that can keep the antelope from completing their appointed rounds.
In 1948, Denis Zaphiro, a major in the colonial Sudan Defense Force,
witnessed the migration as far south as the Loelli plains, near the
Kenyan border. In notes published in the Sudan Wild Life and Sport
journal, he described the herds as “one of the strangest and most awe
inspiring spectacles in Africa.”
Zaphiro, who later served as Ernest Hemingway’s hunting guide, tallied
3,000 tiang crowding a single airstrip. He gave up counting a larger
herd out of “sheer fatigue.”
“The migration has proved itself too vast a thing to be comprehended
clearly and as a whole by a single, casual observer,” Zaphiro wrote.
The migration, however, no longer reaches Loelli. Says Claase: “It’s
already starting to degrade.”
Still, like Zaphiro 75 years ago, Claase struggles for superlatives
when describing the first time she saw the migrating herds from a
two-seat ultralight aircraft, aptly named a Savannah.
“It was just crazy,” she says. “It just doesn’t stop. It’s just such
huge numbers. It’s actually hard to conceptualize because you’re just
flying over and over and over it, and it just keeps going. And it’s
hard to realize that each of those things is an animal. It’s just
mind-blowing.”
https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/worlds-biggest-animal-migration-great-nile-b67e3c0b
END
______________________
John Ashworth
ashwor...@gmail.com
+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile, WhatsApp and Signal)
PO Box 403 - 00206, Kiserian, Kenya
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