The Magnificent Migration: On Safari with the Africa’s Last Great Herds

Title: The Magnificent Migration: On Safari with Africa's Last Great Herds
By: Sy Montgomery
Published: 2019
Call #: x591.568 Montg.S

Gorgeous, elegiac book in which award-winning nature writer Sy Montgomery takes you on a dream safari with the world’s foremost expert on wildebeest, the keystone species for the whole Serengeti. The details of how the wildebeest shape and share the African plain are fascinating. Along the way, you also get to learn about many of the wildebeests’ fellow migrators and also the predators that eagerly await their arrival. Ms. Montgomery also shares short information about other migrations of different creatures across the world to give some perspective. Poignantly, she has a section on how the bison herds looked to John James Audubon on the Great Plains before their migration was ended forever. Sy Montgomery is one of our greatest nature writers and this book reflects her mature skills.  A word of caution: this book is heavy with the weight of poaching, species loss, human encroachment on animals’ ecosystems and also includes frank discussion of animal mating and anatomy. Don’t share it with children younger than 4th grade. And a caveat: there is only one Black African conservationist in this whole book; a missed opportunity. mm

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Tags: conservation, animal migration