Great wildebeest migration to be streamed online

It is one of nature’s most spectacular sights – and one that few people are able to see first hand.

The movement of wildebeest will be available to view live from the famous Maasai Mara in northwest of Nairobi for a week from Tuesday, using Periscope, a live-streaming video app for Twitter, and YouTube’s Live Streaming service. Tourists pay and travel for the goal of seeing this exciting event, when millions of animals go through their yearly venture of running, swimming and battling predators. Between July and October, more than a million of these massive antelopes (plus hundreds of thousands of zebras, gazelles, and elands) hoof it from Serengeti National Park in Tanzania to Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve in search of greener pastures. The stream, along with these additional bonuses, will be accessible on tablets, phones and computers.

It’s an exquisite opportunity that, according to HerdTracker founder Carel Verhoef, no one has an excuse to miss.

There will be two daily broadcasts of between 10 and 20 minutes each for a week, allowing viewers from all over the world to witness the wildebeests’ river crossings, and to “join” safari guides on game drives.

This can prove taxing to their health though, as animals need to cross the Mara River, where crocodiles like to wrestle down the crossing wildlife.

The migration is a remarkable and occasionally gory effort by up to 2 million herbivores to stay alive during a roving round trip that tracks the rains that feed the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem.

Along the way, about 300,000 wildebeest calves are born before the herds make the journey back after the rainy season, providing crucial sustenance to the carnivores along the route.

“We are running out of space worldwide due to the increase in human numbers and this has an effect on everything and not just the migration”, Verhoef said.