Sudan: Africa's New Serengeti

Mike Fay pilots his four-seater Cessna down a short, dusty runway in Mabior, southern Sudan, and up over a landscape of cattle and tukuls, traditional huts that look like giant Hershey's Kisses. A few minutes later, tall yellow grass dotted with emerald-green Balanites trees stretches to the horizon. Fay spots a brown patch and heads toward it—a herd of antelope, which suddenly darts to the right. A few minutes later Fay spots a roan antelope, thought to have gone extinct in Sudan. "Wa-hoo!" he yells, banging his hand on the steering wheel.

Fay, National Geographic's explorer in residence, has been crisscrossing Africa for 25 years searching for wild animals in need of help. He's found thousands of elephants in Chad, and jungles full of chimpanzees, gorillas and forest elephants in Gabon, and he's seen animal populations in Angola and Mozambique, devastated from years of civil war. When he started surveying the 360,000 square kilometers of southern Sudan earlier this year, where government forces once fought the Sudan People's Liberation Army, he wasn't hopeful. He couldn't have been more wrong.

Sudan, it turns out, is teeming with animals. Fay and his colleagues from the Wildlife Conservation Society found that vast stretches of grass and wetlands, once the site of heavy fighting but long since abandoned, serve as a safe haven to almost a million white-eared kob and hundreds of thousands of antelope, numbers that rival those of Africa's Serengeti. He's also seen giraffes, feared extinct in Sudan, as well as buffalo, lions, leopards, eland, crocodiles and hippos. Once all the counting is done, Fay thinks that Sudan could turn out to support the biggest animal migration in Africa. "Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that this kind of abundance in nature existed in a region after 25 years of civil war, virtually unknown to the world at large," he says.

Conservation of wildlife can sometimes be a silver lining to military conflict. Korea's demilitarized zone has become a haven for hundreds of plant and animal species no longer existing elsewhere on the Korean Peninsula. The Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia is now a sanctuary for tigers and elephants. In Sudan, much of the fiercest fighting took place in the central and southern regions in the 1980s and 1990s, but even as late as 2002, bombs were still being dropped on some communities. Millions of people fled the southeast, but the animals stayed behind, continuing their migration through the vast plains and swampland. When the fighting ended in 2004, it had been years since people had set foot in much of the southeast. As a result, animals were free to wander a vast area unimpeded; in one survey Fay saw a mass of kob, gazelles and other herd animals fill an area about 50 kilometers by 80 kilometers.

The animals could prove to be a tourist gold mine for Sudan. Kenya rakes in almost $1 billion a year in tourism due to the great migration in the Masai Mara. Gen. Alfred Akwoch, Sudan's under secretary of Environment, Wildlife, Conservation and Tourism, says he's taking steps to protect the animals for tourism. The Wildlife Conservation Society is working closely with the government on a plan that would integrate thousands of ex-SPLA soldiers into wildlife services. "We could start tourism here tomorrow," says Paul Elkan, the society's local director.

Competing pressures on Sudan's leaders to develop oilfields and other industries could pose a threat to wildlife, however. Industrial permits have already been awarded in many of the migration corridors. Development of the oilfields could threaten the Sudd, the largest freshwater wetland in Africa and home to 10,000 elephants. With the road network being extended into the migration area and a big supply of guns still at large, government officials fear a rise in the bush meat trade. Preserving the unexpected wealth of wild-life will pose a challenge for Sudan and for conservationists. For the moment, Fay and his colleagues are grateful the animals have survived at all.