Atoll Blog article uploaded 30th August 2025 describes the global public art spectacle and promenade of The Herds on an epic odyssey that has just reached it’s destination after a 20,000km march north starting from Congo Basin and up to the Arctic Circle – to flee climate disaster.

On the 3rd of July this year, I was lucky enough to experience first hand a mass migration of an African herd of life-size cardboard puppet animals as it slowly swarmed throughout Manchester city centre. This ‘Tune into the Wild’ was a global promenade called ‘The Herds’, and that had been drawn into the city by the opening of the Manchester International Festival (MIF25), as the music of Manchester Camerata supposedly swirled about them. The only problem for me on the day of my experience, was that the Camerata were largely absent (and their localised repertoire somewhat classically irrelevant anyway) which left me to experience a largely solemn procession as it quietly progressed. It was met along it’s way in evening rush hour by a public interested but silent (albeit more out of incredulous awe and wonderment than anything else). 

This lack of ambience seemed a lost artistic opportunity, as otherwise, The Herds was a wonderful spectacle: A truly global public art climate initiative designed to move hearts and inspire action to renew our bonds with the natural world. Between April and August 2025, the herds of these life-size cardboard puppets swarmed through our cities and parks on a slow, epic 20,000km odyssey north from Congo Basin to Arctic Circle – as they fled climate disaster.

The Herds began their migration in Kinshasa, amidst the verdant lungs of the Congo Basin—a poignant reminder of a rainforest often overlooked yet utterly vital  . There, cardboard creatures—an elephant, lions, gorillas, giraffes, zebras, monkeys and many other beasts enacted their flight, to symbolise climate-forced displacement . To aid their walk, local volunteers were trained to build and animate the puppets using recycled materials, ensuring each city added new, regionally resonant members to the herd . Enroute, they had traversed Lagos, Dakar, Marrakesh, Casablanca, Rabat, and multiple European cities including Barcelona, Madrid, Marseille, Paris and London. From Manchester the herd then visited Aarhus, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Trondheim before its final push north above the Arctic Circle.

At each stop, new animals joined the herd—red deer and wolves in Britain, for instance – signifying how climate flight isn’t just about distant places: it’s happening here, now. Over the entire journey, more than 1,000 puppeteers were trained, animating some 70+ puppets through 56 public events across 11 countries. The slow march united the worlds of arts and science in an urgent call for climate action.

I read only afterwards that the mass migration was to be accompanied by a ‘generative nature soundscape’ using a database of over 6.5 billion animal migration data points sourced from Movebank (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior). Together, these accompanying sounds, evolving along the journey, would source shifting movement patterns, voices of endangered and extinct species and local environmental sounds all together into one living composition: The Sounds of the Unseen as Miiqo Studios in collaboration with KLING KLANG KLONG called it, was the soundscape that by the final destination “echoes the resonance of a world in motion, building a sonic bridge to the more-than-human world”.

If this was available to hear on my day in Manchester, it must have been online and in the ether because I missed it regrettably. Perhaps ‘Tune into the Wild’ had been the cryptic clue lost on my generation? But what I did do afterwards was add my own royalty-free soundscape to modestly help animate what I thought could have been more powerful on that day in question.

I read today that The Herds did finally reached it’s Arctic Circle refuge, taking their final steps at the cliffs of Nordkapp after tclimbing up Jostedalsbreen glacier to greet the sunrise on 1st August. Here, at one of the northernmost points on Earth, the animals stood poised—looking out over a vast sea, with nowhere left to run—a chilling poetic tableau that asked us: “Who are WE in this story?”

The artists behind The Herds—The Walk Productions, led by Amir Nizar Zuabi, with producers like David Lan and Sarah Loader, and puppetry designers including Ukwanda Puppets & Designs, contributed to an initiative that aimed to move hearts rather than lecture with climate data. Their intention was clear: to convey crisis through sensory immersion, uniting art and science, and engage local communities in a shared, emotionally charged experience of climate reality.

POSTSCRIPT: My own, modest The Herds’ video of ‘Tune into the Wild’ in Manchester is on my YouTube channel. Auto-edit video contains music from Shutterstock, licensed by Splice video editing app. Soundtrack is ‘African Safari’ by Zane Dickinson.