How a Nat Geo photographer captured the first-ever drone footage of Earth’s largest land migration

The largest land migration of mammals, featuring six million antelope, takes place in South Sudan as the ungulates cross from wetlands to dry plains and back over the Great Nile Migration Landscape. Ecologists and conservation experts only discovered the migration’s truly massive scale three years ago, as our feature in National Geographic’s May issue details. The story highlights the voices of scientists and conservation experts and includes stunning visuals from photographer Marcus Westberg, who captured the first-ever drone photo of the migration while on assignment in South Sudan.  

Here, Marcus shares the details of what it took to document the overwhelming  scale of these herds on the move, and talks us through his creative approach and his challenges in the field.  

This interview has been condensed for clarity and length. 

What were you looking to document in South Sudan? 

Marcus: What I've documented is the world's largest land mammal migration. We all know about the Serengeti; this is somewhere between two and three times the volume or the number of animals. The bad news is, if you're a photographer, it’s spread out over an area about the size of half of Germany. It's one of the largest wilderness areas left on the planet. 

The migration itself is fantastic, but I think for anyone working in conservation, finding land wilderness areas that are largely intact, that's more exciting because it's much more difficult to restore land than it is to restore wildlife populations. And so the fact that you've got this massive place that clearly can sustain millions and millions of animals—if you can just get some of the threats under control, I mean, it's astonishing. I never thought, before I came across this place, that a place like that even existed. 

Why did it take so long for the world to find out about this migration? 

Conservationists and locals have known that there's a migration taking place, and that it’s pretty big, but the true scale of it has only come to light in the last couple of years. It hasn't been the kind of place you can easily go in and visit. There are essentially no roads, and you've got a history of 20 years of serious unrest [decades of civil war and a war for independence]. It's still not a stable environment to be working in. 

So it was just not a place that was accessible even for flyovers in the past, which means you don't accidentally get footage of this. No one's been putting up camera traps until very recently. 

What were your challenges in the field for this assignment? 

One thing to keep in mind is that these are not animals that travel together in one large group. So it's not like you've got 5 million animals moving around as one. You've got millions of animals in anything from small herds of just a few hundred, two herds of maybe 50, or a hundred thousand in one group. But if you come across one, you don't know how many are in that group. If you're seeing it on the ground, you don't know how many groups there are. 

It sounds like it's such an easy thing to find and photograph. But of course, if you're dealing with an area that's this big, those herds just kind of disappear. You can fly over these herds for 10 minutes. And so, with video, that looks amazing, but getting a still shot when they're not tightly packed together, it just doesn't look as impressive as it feels when you're there. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is balancing the economic conservation and animal welfare side of things with getting footage, because this footage is going to be incredibly helpful. 

The area where the migration takes place is gigantic, and the only way to move across it is by air. Ideally, helicopter, so you can land near the herds. We did try approaching them on foot, but even that is more difficult than it than it seems— because the animals get hunted on foot. So as soon as they see or smell you, you know, they're off. So you're not going to get those lovely close-ups the way you do in the Mara, for example, where you can drive right up to the lion and stick your camera out of the car.  

As far as the visual challenges, I normally enjoy trying to capture as much of a story as possible in a single image, but that would not really have been possible here. The scale is so vast, but if you focus on that, there is no intimacy. And vice versa; if you get really close, you lose the sense of scale. So you really need a series of photographs—and video, too— to even come close to doing it justice. 

How did you manage to take aerial photos and videos? You used primarily a drone but also photographed from a helicopter? 

All of the herds ended up being about 45 minutes to an hour's drive with helicopter from the nearest place to stay. I got a drone permit, which is a first for documenting this migration. And there are two main reasons for doing it: One is that the helicopter is very, very expensive. So rather than flying around for an extra hour, landing and using the drone seemed like a good idea. And the other aspect is, you know, we tend to think of drones as disturbing animals, but they're much more quiet than helicopters. And so it also seemed like a less intrusive way to try to get footage. If they [the animals] feel like we're at a safe distance, then all good. So, you know, whenever we had a chance, instead of just photographing from the air, we tried to land nearby and then put the drone up.  

We'd make sure we were about a kilometer away with the helicopter so that the landing wouldn't disturb them. They're not that bothered by aircraft. They get hunted mostly on foot. So it was much more difficult trying to photograph them from the ground with normal cameras. We ended up hiding in tall grass, being eaten alive by horseflies for over an hour, just on the off  chance that they would get close enough to us.  So we put the drone up, starting high and then working your way closer. I was able to get to probably within 10 or 15 meters [around 30 to 50 feet] without them all being worried about it. 

GPS data normally comes in at five in the morning. Another restriction we have in South Sudan, because of security issues: You can't fly in the dark. And so we would be sitting and waiting in the helicopter or the airplane at dawn and then as soon as the pilot thinks that it's safe enough to take off, that's when we go. So of course you don't get sunrise and sunset because by the time you actually arrive somewhere, that's already happened. Luckily we had a couple of overcast days, where the light wasn't that harsh. 

What does it feel like to be around all these animals? 

Goosebumps. Goosebumps is the way it feels.  I [and my team] have been doing this for a long time now, so it's not like we haven't seen large numbers of wildlife and spectacularly beautiful places before. And even so, I mean, all three of us were squealing sometimes in the mics as we were flying over, particularly the herds of Tiang [antelopes]. So the Tiang aren't as numerous as the Kob, but they bunched together much more, so it looks more impressive. The Kob are a bit more spread out, and they stick a little bit more to woodland areas as well. So you have to pay attention and you realize that, oh, the whole ground is moving, and that's obviously pretty incredible. It is obviously astonishing and flying over some of these herds is like nothing else. 

But the Tiang, when you fly near them, it looks more like the wildebeest in the Serengeti because they're darker, so they stand out a bit more. But then even if you could imagine a similar scene in the Serengeti, again, there's no one here, there's not a single road, there's not a single car track in the areas where we're photographing these animals.  I think the privilege of being able to witness something like that, knowing that very, very few people have ever seen this view, I think that part of it makes it much more special than just the sheer number by itself, which of course is mind blowing as well.  

You also used a 360 camera at times. What was the purpose of that and how did that work out? 

The  idea was to try to get footage from the ground to get more intimate footage, which is a challenge when you can’t drive anywhere.  

The first day we used them, we would've had great footage, except they overheated as the sun warmed up. And so all the batteries died within probably five minutes before the herds actually approached, because we were also trying to keep our distance.  

On the third attempt, we had put them nearer to tall grass. We put them a little bit closer to where the herds were, and we got pretty lucky with one or two cameras, and we didn't quite get as much of it as we were hoping. They ended up bypassing, I think, five of them completely, but they went pretty close to a couple of them. And so we finally managed to get some footage, and I was trying on that day to also get just some shots on the ground, and we waited for well over an hour. So we waited until we knew that the batteries would be finished and we weren't going to disturb the filming. And I half stood up and I think managed three seconds of shots before they saw that somebody was there and then went 200 meters [650 feet] in the wrong direction and then carried on grazing. But in these open lands, this is no way to sneak up on them. 

What inspired you to be interested in wildlife and conservation and how do you approach wildlife photography?  

I think I've always had an interest in nature and animals and wildlife. Not that I thought I would be working with them necessarily, and photography wasn't a big hobby of mine either, but seeing my one-year- old daughter now, who is just crazy about animals and picking wildflowers, I mean, that was basically me at the same age. And then when I was 12, my parents took us outside Europe for the first time, and we went camping in Kenya, and I had two days of being exposed to real wildlife, so to speak, and that triggered something that stayed with me. 

[Eventually] I decided to go and study conservation and environmental management. And I spent a lot of my undergrad organizing to be able to do my thesis research in Kenya. And in the end, I spent the better part of a year in the Masai Mara at one of the lodges there. Any spare time I had, I was out in the reserve and I bought a couple of pieces of equipment before then. I thought, if I'm ever going to get into photography, what better opportunity than this? 

Conservation photography involves both wildlife and people, depending on the situation, and my approach to both are pretty similar: try to minimize disturbance. And that includes always following instructions of guides, rangers or veterinarians without a moment of hesitation, regardless of how good of a photo you think you’re about to take. With people, it’s about not damaging any relationships. In my experience, the quicker you can be, the more likely that people are to remain happy. And so anything that takes extra time is just not for me.  

I would very rarely spend more than 30 seconds or so getting a shot of a person—for that long, pretty much anyone is in a good mood. After that, the risk is that you start losing a little bit of that enthusiasm. And it's not necessarily that you need it to be there for the photo to look good, I just don't like making people feel anything other than completely comfortable.   

So I'd rather move on in that case. And I don't know if that has more to do with just my personality or if it's also linked to how I learned about photography and the fact that from the very beginning it was just camera and lens and nothing else, no frills, just trying to get the shot. 

How does it feel to have captured this kind of first drone photo of the migration and what are your hopes for the impact it will have? 

In the big scheme of things, it matters more that this is the first really big visual representation of the Great Nile Migration. But in terms of people's attention span, a real first—like the drone footage—is just more likely to get this story more attention, which I think will be very meaningful in South Sudan, both to African Parks, but to the country as well. 

And there are, as we discussed in the article as well, of course challenges and threats. There are roads being built, there's mineral deposits, there's an increase in bush meat poaching and African parks, and the government will  have their strategies of trying to deal with that. If we've learned anything from what Mike Fay [the ecologist who discovered the migration in 2007] did, for example, with the MegaTransect [a survey Fay did walking across the Congo Basin in 1999] is that positive attention can put positive pressure on governments to really take conservation seriously.