The incredible journey is the world’s longest overland movement. The relocation route is approximately 800 kilometers long (500 mi). The Ngorongoro Conservation Area lies to the south of this relocation route, and it is here that a huge number of 1,000,000 wildebeests are brought into the world between January and March. By March, when the dry season begins, around 1.5 million wildebeest and 250,000 zebras had begun to migrate north towards Kenya’s Maasai Mara. The wildebeest are joined by eland, zebra, and Thomson’s gazelle. The migrating groups pass through the Western Corridor in April and May.

50 wildebeests suffocate for every wildebeest taken by the crocodiles. When the dry season comes to an end in late October, the migrating throngs begin to return south. Every year, around 250,000 wildebeests and 30,000 field zebras die from suffocation, predation, exhaustion, dehydration, or infection.

Beginning in 2005, Serengeti National Park and Maasai Mara National Reserve formed a Lion Conservation Unit. This biological system is home to almost 3,000 lions. In the dry season, the African panther’s population density is estimated to be 5.41 persons per 100 km2 (39 sq mi).

African shrubbery elephant populations recovered from a population low caused by poaching in the 1980s, and by 2014, they numbered more than 5,000 individuals. Poaching decimated the African bison population between 1976 and 1996, but it rebounded to 28,524 individuals by 2008. Poaching reduced the dark rhinoceros population to roughly ten individuals in the 1980s. Today, less than 50 people survive, primarily in areas less prone to being influenced by wildfires. Rhinos eat grasses, woody Indigofera, Acacia, and Crotalaria forbs and bushes for the most part.