Wildlife Thrives in Southern Sudan, Surveys Reveal

JEFFREY BROWN:

This could be the largest migration of mammals on Earth. A team from the Wildlife Conservation Society and National Geographic recently completed the first aerial wildlife survey in southern Sudan since the start of a civil war in the region in the early 1980s.

What they found was surprising: massive herds of animals that not only survived decades of fighting, but were thriving. One of the project's surveyors was Michael Fay of the Wildlife Conservation Society. He's explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society.

And welcome to you.

MICHAEL FAY, Wildlife Conservation Society:

Thank you for having me.

JEFFREY BROWN:

This was an area that was just too dangerous to be in before this?

MICHAEL FAY:

Yes, the war has been raging for over 20 years, and people pretty much cleared out in the very early '80s and haven't been back since.

JEFFREY BROWN:

And how big an area are we talking about? What's the terrain like?

MICHAEL FAY:

Well, southern Sudan has now been kind of divided from Sudan in general, and it's about as big as Texas.

JEFFREY BROWN:

As big as Texas?

MICHAEL FAY:

Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN:

So what was the expectation going in, that the war had devastated the wildlife population?

MICHAEL FAY:

Yes, I mean, usually, you've got armies with lots of light weapons, wildlife available, they obliterate the wildlife. In southern Sudan, that didn't happen. And you ask why? Why didn't that happen? Well, the SPLA had rules against…

JEFFREY BROWN:

The SPLA is?

MICHAEL FAY:

… the southern Sudanese People's Liberation Army — they had rules against hunting large numbers of animals. But there was also a very large security problem, so people didn't move over the landscape. And we're talking about migratory animals here. So if you've got 800,000 kob moving through a landscape, they might get a few of them as they're passing by, but for most of the time these kob are where people aren't.