The Calving Season: The Great Migration Chapter Nobody Books

Ask anyone what the Great Migration is and they will describe a river. Wildebeest massing on a bank, hesitating, then pouring into brown water while crocodiles work through them. It is a genuine spectacle and it happens for a few months of the year in one part of the ecosystem, and it has so completely captured the public imagination that most travellers believe it is the migration rather than one chapter of it.

There is another chapter, in the early months of the year, that involves more animals, more predators and considerably fewer vehicles. Almost nobody asks for it.

What happens on the southern plains

Between roughly January and March, the herds are not in the north at all. They are down on the short-grass plains of the southern Serengeti and the Ndutu area, and they are giving birth.

The scale is difficult to hold in your head. Several hundred thousand calves are born in a window of a few weeks, with the births heavily synchronized so that the majority arrive in the same short period. On a single morning drive you will see calves being born, calves’ minutes old wobbling upright, and calves of a few days already running with the herd.

The synchronization is a strategy. By flooding the plains with newborns all at once, the herd overwhelms the predators’ capacity to eat them. Individually a calf is desperately vulnerable. Collectively, arriving in that number, most survive. It is one of the more elegant solutions in the natural world, and you are watching it play out in real time.

Why the predators change everything

Here is the part that decides it for most people who understand what they are choosing.

Where there are hundreds of thousands of newborns on open ground, there are predators, and they are not subtle about it. Lion prides concentrate on the plains and hunt in daylight. Cheetah, which need open country and clear sight lines, are at their most visible and most active here, and the short-grass plains of the southern Serengeti are among the best cheetah country in Africa. Hyena work constantly. Jackals take what they can.

Predator sightings in calving season are not a matter of patience and luck in the way they usually are. The hunting is happening around you, repeatedly, in the open, in good light.

This is the honest reason to consider these months. Not the births themselves, moving as they are, but the density of predator activity that the births produce.

The landscape is different too

The southern plains in these months look nothing like the yellowed dry-season Serengeti in photographs.

The short rains have been through. The grass is green and low, cropped by hundreds of thousands of animals, running flat to a horizon broken only by the occasional kopje. The volcanic soil here, enriched by ash from the highlands, produces grass unusually high in the minerals a lactating female needs, which is precisely why the herds come here to calve rather than anywhere else. The geology and the biology are directly connected, and a good guide will explain the link standing in the middle of it.

Visually, it is enormous and clean and open in a way the wooded north is not. Photographers who know the ecosystem often prefer it.

The camps that move

Because the herds shift with the rain rather than the calendar, the best way to be among them is to stay somewhere that moves too.

Mobile tented camps relocate seasonally to follow the migration, which means in calving season they are set up on the southern plains, and by mid-year they have moved north. Staying in one puts you inside the ecosystem rather than driving an hour each morning to reach it. They are smaller than permanent lodges, usually a handful of tents, and they are struck and rebuilt several times a year.

The experience is closer to the older idea of a safari, and for the migration specifically it is simply the better way to do it. You can see how we build these into our Tanzania journeys.

The honest limits

Two things to be clear about, because overselling this would be a disservice.

First, the timing is driven by rainfall, not by dates. The herds usually calve in the southern Serengeti in these months, but a poor or early rainy season shifts them, and nobody can guarantee where they will be in a given fortnight. The Serengeti ecosystem research has tracked these movements for decades and the pattern holds broadly, but broadly is not the same as precisely.

Second, this is not the river crossing. If your image of the migration is specifically wildebeest in water with crocodiles, calving season will not give it to you, and you should travel in the second half of the year instead. It is worth deciding honestly which of the two you actually want before you book, because the answer determines your entire itinerary.

Why so few people go

The imbalance is almost entirely a marketing accident. The river crossings produce the footage. The footage built the reputation. The reputation now drives the bookings, so the northern Serengeti and the Mara fill up between July and October while the southern plains in February are comparatively quiet.

The result is a strange inversion. In the famous months you will share a river crossing with a great many vehicles. In calving season you can watch a cheetah hunt on open ground with almost nobody else present, in a landscape holding more animals than the northern Serengeti sees all year.

There is also a practical advantage. These are not the peak-priced months in the way that the crossing season is, and camp availability is considerably easier.

Two migrations, and the one you have not been sold

The wildebeest do not think of themselves as having a season. The circuit is continuous, and the animals are somewhere in it every day of the year. What has a season is our attention, and our attention has been trained by three decades of television on a single dramatic act in the middle of a much longer play.

If you have watched the documentaries and want to see the thing you have seen, go in the second half of the year and go with your eyes open about the vehicles. That is a legitimate choice and the spectacle earns it.

But if what you actually want is the ecosystem at its most alive, the most animals in one place, and the highest concentration of predators hunting in the open, then the plains in February have been quietly outperforming the rivers for years, and the people who know the Serengeti properly have known it the whole time.

Tell us which version of the migration you have been imagining and we will tell you honestly when to go.