This is the Southern Serengeti Plain, a vast expense of African bush, over fifty six hundred square miles in which one of the world’s most magnificent natural phenomena occurs, the great wilderbeast migration. In the simplest terms it’s essentially a perpetual movement of two to three million depending on who’s counting, wilderbeast, zebra and gazelle on a circular migratory circuit of over eighteen hundred miles that last all year.
If there is an actual beginning of the migration, perhaps it’s in the Southern Serengeti, where hundreds of thousands of cubs are born each year, January through March. Cubbing begins in earnest when the rains arrive which also transform the dry Southern Serengeti plain into a lash grass land and with wilderbeast and zebra stretching in every direction as far as the eye can see in many cases. This program is essentially the added room for collection of stories that didn’t make it in one of the previous for Discoveries Africa Program. In some cases, like this cheetah and her two cubs, more material than in the original program, it’s just two cute not to see.
The mother will keep her cubs for one and a half to two years, as they learn to hunt, fed for themselves. The cheetah is the fastest mammal in the bush, they can go from zero to sixty in three seconds and leap over twenty feet, a remarkable five times their body weight.
The safari vehicles are now part of their landscape, so they will often just hang around for a while for pictures or until they get bored.
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