This is the World’s Biggest Animal Migration

The Great Nile Migration, a Sudan Defense Force official once said, is “too vast a thing to be comprehended clearly and as a whole by a single, casual observer.” The Wall Street Journal sent two—reporter Michael M. Phillips and photographer Brent Stirton—to document the massive migration of antelopes, an event rarely seen by those outside South Sudan. The word count here is minimal, even counting the dateline and captions. That’s not a bad thing: Stirton’s images are stunning, and a compelling attraction all their own. But Phillips makes each word count, briskly detailing a history of conflict that has hobbled ecotourism plans and yet safeguarded the migration itself.

Six million antelope swarm across an area the size of Illinois, a mass movement of mammals triple the size of the Serengeti wildebeest trek, the go-to migration for TV nature shows. The animals storm through sparse forests and open savannah, trickles of antelope merging to become streams, streams swelling and spreading until the landscape is filled with thundering rivers of white-eared kob, tiang, Mongalla gazelle and Bohor reedbuck. A single herd can number 100,000 antelope, or more.

“This is the greatest migration of large fauna in the world, including the oceans,” says renowned naturalist Mike Fay, who is conducting an antelope head-count in South Sudan. “The entire planet should be amazed that this exists.”

Yet the Great Nile Migration remains virtually unknown to outsiders and preposterously difficult to witness. Would-be visitors have to travel to a country that’s been engulfed in on-again-off-again war for decades, and is on again. Then there’s the terrain. The animals move through a landscape with virtually no roads, not even rough safari tracks, and are easily viewable only from helicopters or slow-flying ultralight aircraft.