Serengeti National Park

Serengeti National Park, national park and wildlife refuge on the Serengeti Plain in north-central Tanzania. It is partly adjacent to the Kenya border and is northwest of the adjoining Ngorongoro Conservation Area. It is best known for its huge herds of plains animals—especially gnu (wildebeests), gazelles, and zebras—and it is the only place in Africa where vast land-animal migrations still take place. The park, an international tourist attraction, was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1981.

The park was established in 1951 and covers 5,700 square miles (14,763 square km) of some of the best grassland range in Africa, as well as extensive acacia woodland savanna. With elevations ranging from 3,020 to 6,070 feet (920 to 1,850 meters), the park extends 100 miles (160 km) southeast from points near the shores of Lake Victoria and, in its eastern portion, 100 miles (160 km) south from the Kenya-Tanzania border. It is along the “western corridor” to Lake Victoria that many of the park’s animals migrate. In the 2020s some 2,000,000 gnu (wildebeest), 300,000 zebras, 900,000 gazelles, and numerous other animals were in the area. During the wet season, from November to May, the herds graze in the southeastern plains within the park. In late May or June one major group moves west into the park’s woodland savanna and then north into the grasslands just beyond the Kenya-Tanzania border, an area known as the Mara (Masai Mara National Reserve). Another group migrates directly northward. The herds return to the park’s southeastern plains in about November, as the dry season ends with the onset of short rains.

In addition to more than 35 species of plains animals, there are great numbers of lions, spotted hyenas, leopards, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, giraffes, cheetahs, baboons, and elephants. Crocodiles inhabit the marshes near the Mara River. More than 500 species of birds, including ostriches, vultures, and flamingos, have also been recorded.

Since the park’s establishment, various threats to the animal populations there have been observed. The last of the Serengeti’s wild dogs disappeared in 1991; it is possible that the local extinction was due to increasing competition from the growing hyena and lion populations, coupled with an outbreak of disease. An epidemic of canine distemper caused the deaths of nearly one-third of the area’s lions in 1994. Humans have also posed a danger to the animal population, killing elephants for their ivory tusks, slaughtering the critically endangered black rhinoceros for its horn, and poaching game animals for meat.

The first systematic wildlife population survey in the area was undertaken by the German zoologist Bernhard Grzimek in the late 1950s. The park’s headquarters are near its center, at Seronera, where there is also a visitor’s center as well as the Serengeti Wildlife Research Centre (established as the Serengeti Research Institute, 1962).