The Serengeti great migration begins in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
The opening phase occurs on the short-grass plains of the southeastern Serengeti ecosystem, including the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Around January to March, the herds concentrate there as seasonal rains produce nutritious grass and the calving season begins.
The migration involves roughly 1.7 million wildebeest, along with hundreds of thousands of zebra and gazelles. After calving, the animals gradually move west and north through Serengeti National Park, eventually reaching Kenya’s Maasai Mara before cycling south again.
A common mistake is to treat the “great migration” as a one-time march or as an event that begins at the Mara River crossings. Those crossings are a later northern phase. Ngorongoro also means the wider conservation area, not simply the famous Ngorongoro Crater, which is not the main calving plain.