A short video recorded in Serengeti National Park on December 27, 2025 shows a young wildebeest calf closely following a safari vehicle.
At first glance, the scene raises concern. Is the calf confused or distressed? Where is its mother? To understand what is happening, it is important to look deeper into animal behaviour, especially parental care and early learning in the wild.
Not all animals provide parental care after birth. In some species, the young are born fully independent and must survive without guidance from their parents.
In species that do provide parental care, however, survival depends heavily on early learning. In such animals, more than 90 per cent of brain development and behaviour is shaped after birth through learning, while only a small portion is made up of inborn instincts.
These inborn behaviours include actions such as suckling, basic predator avoidance and mating instincts.
Everything else is learned through interaction with the mother and the surrounding environment. One of the most important early learning processes is known as imprinting.
Imprinting happens shortly after birth. During this critical period, the newborn learns to recognise its mother.
The brain identifies the first large, moving object the young animal sees as “mother,” and this recognition guides all future attachment and learning. Once imprinting is completed, it cannot be reversed.
To understand the Serengeti case, it is also important to know that there are two groups of wildebeest in the ecosystem. Resident wildebeest live within Serengeti and nearby areas and do not take part in the famous long-distance migration.
Migratory wildebeest, on the other hand, move seasonally between Serengeti and areas such as Masai Mara, Ngorongoro, Maswa and Grumeti.
The two groups also have different calving seasons. Resident wildebeest usually give birth between November and March, while migratory wildebeest calve mainly from late January to mid-March.
Since the video was recorded in late December, the calf seen is most likely a resident wildebeest.
What we are likely witnessing is a calf that became separated from its mother shortly after birth. This separation could have been caused by a predator disturbance or another sudden environmental event.
As a result, the imprinting process between the calf and its mother was interrupted before it could be completed.
In wildebeest, imprinting usually begins about two hours after birth and is completed within the first few hours. The calf in the video appears to have been separated before this critical period had passed.
Wildebeest are precocial animals, meaning that within minutes of birth, a calf can stand and walk. When the calf encountered the safari vehicle, it identified it as the first large moving object nearby.
The warmth from the vehicle’s tyres may have resembled body heat, triggering an instinctive association with safety, milk and protection. This is why the calf followed the vehicle.
Had the calf remained close to the vehicle for two hours or more, imprinting would likely have been completed.
The vehicle would then have been permanently recognised as the calf’s “mother.” Even if the calf later encountered other wildebeest, it would not follow them, because imprinting, once completed, cannot be undone. At that point, the main challenge would not be attachment, but the lack of milk.
Nature has shown similar cases before. There are documented instances where a lioness has raised a leopard cub, or a cow has raised a leopard cub.
In such situations, the young animal grows up fully believing that the foster parent is its true mother.
This happens not because of compassion or confusion, but because imprinting was completed with the foster parent rather than the biological one.
Serengeti is not a land of miracles. It is a land of precise natural processes. Nature does not make mistakes.
Instead, it constantly shapes and reshapes life through laws refined over millions of years. What we see in this video is not an error, but nature’s first lesson in survival sometimes harsh, always exact.