Classroom lesson · Wildlife · 🇸🇸 South Sudan

Boma National Park

Home to one of the world's greatest wildlife migrations

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

Boma National Park is a vast wild area in the east of South Sudan where something truly amazing happens every year: millions of animals move across the land in one of the biggest wildlife migrations anywhere on Earth. White-eared kob antelope, tiang antelope, and Mongalla gazelles sweep across the grasslands in herds so large they look like a moving carpet from the sky.

Tell me more

Migration means a regular journey that animals make — usually to follow rain, fresh grass, or water. The animals in and around Boma travel huge distances between the wet and dry seasons. Scientists who flew over the area counted more than a million animals moving at once — which is even more remarkable than the famous wildebeest migration in East Africa.

The white-eared kob is the star of Boma. It is a medium-sized, reddish-brown antelope with round, white-edged ears that flash in the sunlight as the herd runs. Males have curved horns and stand proudly on flat-topped termite mounds to show off for females. Their hooves pound the dry earth with a sound like distant thunder.

Boma is also home to elephants, buffalos, lions, leopards, and giraffes. The park has been protected for a long time, which means the animals have safe places to raise their young. Baby elephants stay close to their mothers' legs, and young antelopes can run within hours of being born.

The park gets its name from the Boma Plateau — a high grassy plateau where the air is cooler and mist rolls in during the wet season. From the plateau, on a clear day, you can see all the way across the flat plains where the great herds gather.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01A million animals moving together is almost impossible to imagine. Can you think of something else that happens in very large numbers?
  2. 02Animals migrate because the seasons change. How do the seasons change where you live, and what do you do differently?
  3. 03Baby antelopes run within hours of birth. Humans take about a year to walk. Why might a baby antelope need to move so quickly?
Try this

Classroom activity

In pairs, draw a large grassland map. Mark the wet-season grazing area and the dry-season grazing area. Draw arrows showing the route the white-eared kob herd might travel between them. How far is it? How many weeks might the journey take? Write your estimates next to the arrows.