The kind of book I used to love, but hard to enjoy because felt like it took me so long to get through, and took effort to stay focused (sigh). It’s about a safari trip that the author took with her good friend (also an author) Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and renowned researcher Dr. Richard Estes- leading expert on wildebeest- and several other people, across the African Serengeti to see the wildebeest migration. Lots of other animals too. It took them quite a while to find the actual migration. They would come across smaller groups of wildebeest here and there, or the tail end of the herds- injured animals and lost calves- but finally near the end of the book encountered the masses of animals that reached from horizon to horizon. It sounds stunning.
Most of the book is about their travels through the bush, describing the work of locals to support and protect wildlife (a huge effort underway removing wire snares), encounters with tourist vehicles (Estes grousing that they’re always stopped to look at lions- which inevitably are doing nothing but lying around- when he thinks that wildebeest and their fellow herbivores like zebras and impalas, are much more interesting), mishaps when their car breaks down, sightings of other species (hyraxes, cheetah, many kinds of vultures, dik-dik, leopards and more) and explanations about the behavior they witness. Which was all very interesting! There’s also interspersed many pages about other animal migrations- from monarch butterflies and arctic terns to sea turtles and zooplankton in the ocean.
The photographs are great, and take up a lot of page space. Which made this a slightly easier read for me.
Borrowed from the public library.
