Ngorongoro Conservation Area

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Lore & Background

Under British rule after World War I, game preservation ordinances restricted hunting, and by 1930 the crater was included. The 1948 National Park Ordinance created Serengeti National Park (SNP) in 1951, but the 1959 Ngorongoro Conservation Area Ordinance separated the NCA from the SNP to secure land rights for Maasai pastoralists, who were relocated from the SNP to the NCA. The NCAA was established to manage the area as a multi-use protected area, supporting Maasai traditions while preserving natural and cultural values.

Reader's Guide

The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is significant as a UNESCO World Heritage Site that combines natural and cultural heritage, including the Ngorongoro Crater and Olduvai Gorge. It is a key part of the Serengeti ecosystem, hosting the Great Migration and supporting diverse wildlife. The NCAA's mission includes supporting Maasai traditions, but tensions persist, with the IUCN seeking collaborative solutions. The area's geological features include eight extinct shield volcanoes, with the Ngorongoro Crater formed by a volcanic collapse 2 to 3 million years ago. The crater's water sources include the Munge and Oljoro Nyuki Rivers, Ngoitokitok Spring, and Lake Magadi, a shallow alkaline lake. The NCA's boundaries adjoin Serengeti National Park and include the Serengeti Plains, Salei Plains, and Gol Mountains inselbergs.

Did You Know?

• In 1959, an area of 8,300 km2 was split off from Serengeti National Park and re-established as Ngorongoro Conservation Area to accommodate Maasai traditional land use.
• The name 'Serengeti' is often attributed to a Maasai word 'siringet' meaning 'the place where the land runs on forever' or 'endless plains', but this word does not appear in dictionaries of the language.
• The great migration is the world's second longest overland migration, after caribou migration, with a complete route around 800 km.
• Around 250,000 wildebeest and 30,000 plains zebras die annually from drowning, predation, exhaustion, thirst, or disease during the migration.
• The Serengeti National Park was established in 1940, and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area was created in 1959.

The Great Migration

The Serengeti hosts the world's second-longest overland animal migration, trailing only the caribou crossing in the Arctic. The full circuit spans roughly 800 kilometers, threading through the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to the north where approximately half a million wildebeest calves are born each January through March. As the dry season begins in March, an estimated 1.5 million western white-bearded wildebeest set out alongside 250,000 Grant's zebra, joined by herds of common eland, plains zebra, and Thomson's gazelle. The route pushes northward through the Western Corridor in April and May before the herds face the most perilous stretch: crossing the Grumeti and Mara Rivers, where roughly 3,000 crocodiles hold their ground. The toll is staggering — for every single wildebeest seized by a crocodile, fifty more drown. When the rains return in late October, the survivors turn south. Each year, around 250,000 wildebeest and 30,000 plains zebra perish from drowning, predation, exhaustion, thirst, or disease, making this one of nature's most dramatic and costly spectacles.

Conservation History & the Shaping of Boundaries

The idea of formally protecting the Serengeti traces back to 1930, when Major Richard Hingston, traveling in Tanganyika on behalf of the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire, urged that the region be designated a national park to shield it from the growing pressures of human settlement and economic expansion. The designation came a decade later in 1940. Strict administrative control followed in 1948 with the creation of the Serengeti National Park Board of Trustees, and the government imposed restrictions on the movements of the resident Maasai community. Park boundaries were locked in by 1951. A significant reshaping occurred in 1959, when 8,300 square kilometers in the eastern sector were carved out and re-established as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, creating a multiple-use zone that honored Maasai traditional land practices. That same year, Bernhard Grzimek and his son Michael brought the park to global attention with their book and film Serengeti Shall Not Die. Dedicated scientific monitoring began in 1966 with the founding of the Serengeti Research Institute at Seronera, focused on tracking the Great Migration. By 1981, the park's extent had shrunk to roughly 12,950 square kilometers — less than half of the broader Serengeti ecosystem.

A Tapestry of Predators and Prey

The Serengeti supports an extraordinary density and variety of large mammals. Since 2005 it has been part of a shared Lion Conservation Unit with Kenya's Maasai Mara, and more than 3,000 lions inhabit this combined ecosystem — though a 1994 canine distemper outbreak wiped out roughly a third of them in a single season. African leopards maintain a dry-season density of about 5.41 individuals per 100 square kilometers. The park is also home to cheetahs, and the African wild dog, which had vanished by 1991, was reintroduced in 2012. Smaller carnivores such as aardwolves, African civets, common genets, zorillas, and striped weasels add further layers to the food web. Primate life clusters in the gallery forests along the Grumeti River, where yellow and olive baboons, vervet monkeys, and mantled guereza coexist. The avian roster exceeds 500 species, ranging from Masai ostrich and secretarybird to crowned cranes, shoebills, martial eagles, and numerous vulture species. This concentration of predators and prey in one landscape makes the Serengeti one of the most biologically rich savanna systems on Earth.

Scars of Poaching and the Long Road to Recovery

Decades of poaching left deep scars across the Serengeti's megafauna. In the 1980s, the eastern black rhinoceros was driven to roughly ten individuals, and fewer than seventy survive in the park today. The Masai giraffe population plummeted from 10,750 in 1977 to an estimated 3,520 by 2010, though numbers have since stabilized in the park's core while continuing to slip in edge zones. African buffalo herds declined sharply between 1976 and 1996 under poaching pressure before rebounding to 28,524 by 2008. Elephant populations, devastated by the same poaching wave in the 1980s, have since climbed past 5,000 individuals as of 2014. Yet threats remain active: deforestation, human population growth, ongoing poaching, and competing ranching interests all press against the park's boundaries. The name "Serengeti" itself is often linked to a Maasai word, siringet, meaning "the place where the land runs on forever" or "endless plains" — though that term does not appear in any published Maasai dictionary, a small reminder that even the park's identity carries a layer of uncertainty.