Wildebeest crossing Kenya's Mara River (Photo: Christopher Michel/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)
Forget the Bear Cam—those lazy jerks just stand in the river all day. The real heroes and athletes of the animal kingdom are herds of migrating wildebeest, and now you can watch them on YouTube and Periscope as they thunder across the plains.
Every year, the wildebeest of the Serengeti head north in the spring and south in the winter, like majestic mammalian geese. (If you're not familiar with the wildebeest, they're sort of like an antelope cosplaying as a bison.) More than a million of them make the thousand-mile trip, accompanied by hangers-on like zebras and impalas. It's one of the largest migrations of mammals in the world, and it's supposed to be one of the most breathtaking. And now, you can see it for yourself.
Safari company Discover Africa has apparently made peace with the fact that most people in the world will never be able to afford their travel packages, and they're offering the rest of us a consolation prize: live-streaming Periscope videos of the wildebeest migration, twice a day from September 29 to October 5.
If you miss the live-streams, you can still watch the videos on Periscope (for a limited time) or YouTube. You can also use the HerdTracker to find out where those crazy 'beests are right now.
The videos cannot be accurately described as "high-quality," but they're accompanied by narration from experts. And even if you're not looking at Planet Earth levels of fidelity, it's kind of amazing to think that you're witnessing an epic-scale event as it happens.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to edit@atlasobscura.com.