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5 Fascinating Facts About The Blue Wildebeest

5 Fascinating Facts About the Blue Wildebeest

5 Fascinating Facts About the Blue Wildebeest

The grazing herd animal known as the Blue Wildebeest has gained notoriety as a major participant in the Serengeti’s “Great Migration,” which is frequently referred to as the world’s best animal spectacle.

The safari novice may mistake it for the much larger buffalo because to its dark coloring, cow-like horns, and front-heavy profile. Nonetheless, the wildebeest is an antelope and is a member of the Alcelaphinae subfamily, which also includes blesbok, topi, and hartebeest.5 Fascinating Facts About the Blue Wildebeest

There are five separate subspecies of the blue wildebeest, and they differ somewhat in size and color. For example, the larger common wildebeest (C. t. taurinus) in southern Africa has a black beard, whereas the western white-bearded wildebeest (C. t. mearnsi) in the Serengeti has a white beard.

Approximately 80 to 90 percent of blue wildebeest calves are born within a synchronized birthing window of two to three weeks, typically at the beginning of the rainy season when there is an abundance of fresh vegetation for the females to make milk. Predators are overpowered by the huge numbers and have minimal effect on the total number of wildebeest.

Wildebeest do not all migrate. Some establish tiny resident herds that stay in the same region all year round, often consisting of up to ten mothers and their young. These herds’ females have a tendency to create hierarchies of dominance and eject intruders who try to join.

Blue wildebeests consume different portions of the grass to avoid competing with plains zebra, which frequently graze beside them. Wildebeest prefer the shorter grasses down low, where their wider muzzle maximizes their grazing efficiency, but zebra prefer the longer grasses, processing this rougher food with their stronger digestive systems and shearing front teeth.

When veterinary cordon barriers impeded their migration paths during the drought in the mid-1980s, some 50,000 blue wildebeest died in Botswana’s Kalahari.