Serengeti’s “endless plains” name may be a tourist myth
Serengeti National Park covers 14,763 square kilometres of northern Tanzania savanna—over 15,000 if broader grassland figures are counted—and was established in 1940. It hosts the planet’s largest land migration: more than 1.5 million wildebeest, 250,000 Grant’s zebra, and hundreds of thousands of Thomson’s gazelle.
Guidebooks often trace the name to a Maasai word, siringet, meaning endless plains, but that word does not appear in Maasai dictionaries. In 1930 Major Richard Hingston, touring Tanganyika for a British imperial wildlife-protection society, urged that the game reserve become a national park to shield it from growing settlement and development. Strict management under trustees began in 1948, Maasai movement was restricted and the boundaries fixed in 1951, and in 1959 about 8,300 square kilometres were cut out of the park.
International fame followed Bernhard Grzimek and his son Michael’s 1959 book and film Serengeti Shall Not Die. The Serengeti Research Institute opened at Seronera in 1966 to study the migration. By 1981 the park covered 12,950 square kilometres, under half of the wider Serengeti ecosystem.
More than 3,000 lions live in that ecosystem, which since 2005 has formed a Lion Conservation Unit together with Kenya’s Maasai Mara; a canine distemper outbreak in 1994 killed roughly a third of them. Leopards reach an estimated 5.41 per 100 square kilometres in the dry season. Elephants rebounded from 1980s poaching to more than 5,000 by 2014, and buffalo recovered to 28,524 by 2008, but black rhinos, cut to about ten in the 1980s, still number fewer than 70.
Masai giraffes fell from 10,750 in 1977 to about 3,520 in 2010, stabilising in the park’s core while declining at its edges. African wild dogs, gone since 1991, were brought back in 2012. Hippos, aardvarks, aardwolves, pangolins, bat-eared foxes and hyraxes also live here, and baboons, vervets and colobus monkeys frequent the Grumeti River’s gallery forests.
Source: Serengeti National Park
