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WONDERS OF NATURE
Serengeti. Nature miracle
The Serengeti National Park (Tanzania) is one of the largest in Africa. It is located in East tropical Africa, on the vast Serengeti plain. It extends from the border with Kenya in the north to Lake Eyasi in the south, from the Olduvai Gorge (where Dr. L Leakey discovered the remains of the most ancient man) in the east to Lake Victoria in the west. The area of the Serengeti Park is 1295 thousand hectares.
Africans long ago chose this place rich in game with a relatively cool climate. Representatives of the Ndorobo tribe hunted here, people from the Ikoma tribe were engaged in agriculture, the Maasai grazed their herds. Everything was relatively calm until the Serengeti plateau was discovered by Europeans. In 1892, the German traveler Oscar Baumann visited here with his detachment. A short time later, hunters rushed to the Serengeti, special hunting expeditions began to be organized - safaris, for which foot detachments with porters were equipped to catch animals. In 1920, the American L Simpson arrived in the Serengeti in a Ford car. From that moment began the era of car safaris. "Oh! how beautiful nature is, until man comes to defile it!" - the English writer Ryder Haggard was indignant at the invasion of the colonists in South Africa. The German traveler Hans Schomburgk said that hunters cut off the tongues of shot mountain goats, leaving the corpses to be eaten by hyenas, jackals and kites. V. Peskov writes: "White hunters" from Europe, chasing lions and wanting to look like romantic heroes, created a myth about the exceptional ferocity and bloodthirstiness of lions. The confrontation was like this: on the one hand, a hunter with a powerful rifled weapon and with a spare gun held by a squire, and on the other, a pursued lion, protected only by what nature gave him. B. Grzimek notes: "Only in one hunting expedition (safari) more than a hundred lions were often killed. The shooters were not able to carry so many skins with them and therefore were content with cutting off the tail of each animal as a trophy." So, one hunter John Hunter said that in 90 days he killed 88 lions and 10 leopards. But Leslie Simpson was "lucky" more: in a year he killed 365 lions. Moreover, if Hunter explained his "shock work" by the fact that within nine months two man-eating lions killed 28 people who participated in the construction of the road from Mombasa to Uganda, and he, as authorized by the authorities, had to take retaliatory measures (there were no other animals in the district that could serve as food for a lion), then Simpson hunted lions for sport. If people continued to act like this and further, then large animals would be threatened with complete extinction. Therefore, in 1937, a game reserve was organized in the Serengeti, and in 1951 the Serengeti area became known as a national park. The boundaries of the national park have changed several times. At first, the northern regions near the border with Kenya were not part of it, but the Ngorongoro Crater was included in the park. In 1959, the eastern part, along with the crater, was taken out of the park, and the northern regions that connected the Serengeti National Park with the Mara Reserve in Kenya, the right bank of the Grumeti River, were included in its composition. Professor Bernhard Grzimek and his son Michael, the authors of the book "The Serengeti Must Not Die", explored the migration routes of ungulates and proved that in order to protect the herds of nomadic animals, it is necessary to expand the boundaries of the park (during the dry season, animals go to graze northwest of protected areas ). Unfortunately, Michael died in a plane crash during one of the flights over the Serengeti plains. He was buried on the very crest of the Ngorongoro Crater. A significant amount of money was collected for the construction of a monument to the deceased researcher, but the father decided to use these funds to create a research laboratory named after Michael Grzimek. Later, the Serengeti International Research Institute was opened on the basis of the laboratory. The number of animals is growing every year, and this creates new problems for the protection of landscapes and natural balance. More than a million large ungulates graze on the plains of the Serengeti, and thousands of predators seek food among their herds. Such accumulations of wild animals cannot be seen anywhere else in Africa, and throughout the world. According to eyewitnesses, the land of the Serengeti seems black from animals. Representatives of almost the entire fauna of Africa live here (antelopes, hyenas, ostriches, zebras, lions, elephants, giraffes, rhinos, etc.). According to experts, about half a million Thomson and Grant antelopes, 350 thousand wildebeest, 180 thousand zebras, 43 thousand buffaloes, 40 thousand swamps, 20 thousand kongoni, 15 thousand eland, 7 thousand giraffes, more than 2 thousand elephants, 2 thousand hyenas live in the Serengeti , 1 thousand lions, 500 hippos, 500 leopards, 200 rhinos, 200 hyena dogs. Only large animals here there are one and a half million. Driving through the Serengeti National Park, you can meet a herd of wildebeest, a group of mountain goats, giraffes. For every thousand ungulates, there is, for example, one lion. Drivers take visitors to the area controlled by the lion and his family without much concern, who are usually peaceful and let tourists get quite close to them. The study and protection of animals is carried out by people who have received qualified training for three years in the only educational institution of its kind in all of Africa, located in Tanzania. American zoologist George Schaller spoke about his work in the Serengeti National Park on the pages of one of the magazines published in the United States. He spends most of his time with his assistant on an all-terrain vehicle: he tracks down lions, and then "shoots" them with medical syringes filled with a sleeping substance. Having shot the lion, Schaller and his assistant immediately go to the victim. For some lions, the scientist attaches large bright red clips to the earlobes, which allow you to notice the lion from afar, for others he puts on a kind of collar with built-in small radio transmitters. For a minute, scientists measure the temperature of animals, take blood for analysis. A little while later, the lion rises from the ground and walks away. Thanks to new methods of research, a lot has been learned about lions. Only in the Serengeti are lions climbing trees to escape the tsetse fly. The "King of the Beasts" is a well-known lazy person - out of twenty-four hours a day, he sleeps at least fifteen. Park staff also found out that adult lions reliably guard the places where lionesses raise their offspring. Going hunting, the lioness hides the cubs sometimes for a whole day in the thickets. When the children grow up, their mothers take them hunting. When a young lion is one year old, he can already hunt himself. Usually sick and weak animals fall into his paws, because a lion cannot develop a speed of more than 55 km per hour, and Thomson's gazelle, for example, overcomes 80 km of the plain in an hour. Ungulates can approach a lion at a distance of 350 m without risking anything. Sometimes lions have to be content with carrion or the remains of animals bullied by other predators, and lion cubs even become victims of other animals. Once in the Serengeti Park there was such an incident. The lioness hid two cubs in the bushes and went hunting. At a distance of one and a half kilometers from a secluded place, she managed to catch an antelope. The lioness returned for the babies. While she was carrying one cub, the leopard intervened in the division of food: he managed to feast on the antelope, and then grabbed the left lion cub. Lions usually leave rhinos alone, and do not mess with elephants (an angry elephant can break a lion's spine with one stroke of its trunk). And lions hunt buffaloes in a whole flock. One day, a park attendant drove around the area in a car and saw fifteen lions chasing a herd of buffaloes in huge leaps. After counting the lions, the attendant suddenly felt that something heavy had landed on the seat of his car. Turning his head, he found a lioness sitting next to him, the last to run. The man jumped out of the jeep on the move, which was clearly surprised by the lioness hurrying for prey. After the uncontrolled car crashed into a tree, the lioness rushed to catch up with her. The number of lions in the Serengeti is almost unchanged. A thousand lions kill not so many herbivores and at the same time prevent them from breeding so much that these animals are deficient in food. "The lion reigns without harming the Serengeti. These animals are an integral and valuable part of the reserve," says George Schaller. In the northern part of the Serengeti, you can meet bustards or guinea fowls. Wildebeest herds of several hundred heads, zebras, herds of Thomson's gazelles, and impala lyre-horned gazelles are often found among the bushes. Here you can see small groups of topi and kongoni, giraffes, Kaffir buffaloes, elephants. Among the thickets, you can see a single lioness. Black-backed jackals are hurrying somewhere. Busy hunting cheetahs. Vultures and vultures soar in the sky. Wildebeest and zebras migrate annually within the national park and beyond. At the height of the dry season, giant concentrations of ungulates gather in the northern and northwestern parts of the park, in the valleys of the Mara and Grumeti rivers, which flow into Lake Victoria. During the rainy season, wildebeest and zebra herds move south and southeast. In December, when the savannas between the Seronera and the Olduvai Gorge are covered with fresh greenery, herds of wildebeest and zebras come there. In late May - early June, the plains of the eastern Serengeti dry up, and wildebeest herds begin to migrate. With this massive migration, herds of black wildebeest with groups of accompanying zebras stretch endlessly beyond the horizon. And after the ungulates move their companions - lions, cheetahs, hyenas. They pounce at any opportunity on their prey - primarily on sick and wounded animals. The administrative center of the Serengeti National Park is the small village of Seronera, located at an altitude of 1525 m above sea level. It is home to the National Park Authority, a small museum, the Seronera Lodge Hotel, the Safari Camp, and homes for park staff. Nearby are the buildings of the Serengeti Research Institute and the laboratory named after Michael Grzimek. Near the border with Kenya, in the northern part of the Serengeti, the Lobo Hotel is located - a three-story building with open verandas and galleries, literally built into the rocks (even a swimming pool was built in one of the blocks). Animals here can only be admired from the balconies, and the first floor is occupied by office space. The only way out of the hotel is to the courtyard between the rocks, and from there drive out by car through a narrow crevice. Such precautions are associated with increased danger - buffaloes and antelopes like to graze near the hotel, at night a lion can approach the dwelling, from the growl of which the windows rattle. Author: Yudina N.A.
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