Watch a Million Wildebeest Migrate Across the Serengeti

Twice a year, more than a million wildebeest travel across the Serengeti grasslands of Kenya and Tanzania to find fresh grazing ground. Their annual round trips can stretch for nearly 1000 miles, and the average wildebeest may actually sprint 40 miles of the distance. Accompanied by thousands of zebras, impalas, and other herbivores, the animals must ford crocodile-crowded rivers and evade predators like lions, cheetahs, and hyenas.

The perilous journey, which has been called one of the “seven natural wonders of Africa,” is a breathtaking sight. Now, you can watch it unfold from the safety of your own home.

An app called Herdtracker pinpoints where the greatest concentrations of megafauna are during the course of the migration. Contributors upload their videos of the scene from across the migration route, which covers a section of northern Tanzania from the Kenyan border nearly as far south as Olduvai Gorge. While some of the clips aren’t exactly Sir David Attenborough-level quality, viewers do get to experience raw footage of the wildebeest swimming across streams, scrambling up riverbanks, and generally moving in one direction en masse. The real-time videos and highlight packages are now viewable on YouTube—like this one that captures a massive wildebeest river crossing.

Many of the contributors are wilderness guides at the camps set up along the migration route. Tourists might spend tens of thousands of dollars to stay at a camp or lodge and witness the spectacle first-hand, crossing the once-in-a-lifetime experience off their bucket list. If you don’t have a few grand lying around, the guides’ videos are the next best thing. Herdtracker compiled the highlight reel below to recap 2023’s epic migration.

Curious about the other six natural wonders of Africa? The public voted in a 2013 poll to establish the continent's most spectacular sights. The final results:

Natural Wonder	Location
The Red Sea’s coral reefs	The Red Sea coasts of Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea
Mount Kilimanjaro	Tanzania
The Sahara Desert	Across northern Africa from Mauritania to Sudan and from Tunisia to Niger
The Serengeti migration	Kenya and Tanzania
Ngorongoro Crater	Tanzania
The Okavango Delta	Botswana
The Nile River	From Egypt’s Mediterranean coast to Lake Victoria in Uganda

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A version of this story was published in 2015; it has been updated for 2024.