Best Places for Wildlife Viewing Safaris in Uganda
One of Uganda’s most outstanding features is its forests, several lakes & its mountains. Most of the country is high above sea level & is watched over by 3 areas that are mountainous. These areas include the Rwenzori Mountains, Mountain Elgon and the spectacular Virunga Mountains.
Uganda has a number of national parks and game reserves. The rainforests of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and Mgahinga are the natural habitat of some of the last surviving mountain gorillas in the world, and the Kibale Forest contains the highest density per square mile of primates in the world, including chimpanzees.
Queen Elizabeth National Park, with its wide-open plains, lakes and ancient volcanic craters, offers visitors a chance to see a wide range of African game. The Queen Elizabeth National Park protected area encompasses a vast array of habitats that range from savannah and wetlands to riverine and lowland forest.
In this diverse ecosystem, water dominates the landscape, with 250km of shoreline along Lake Rudolf and Lake George. The lakes, the Kazinga Channel, and the Ishasha River provide a very rich habitat for several mammals and bird species, which reward excellent wildlife viewing and spectacular scenery and landscapes.
Although heavily poached in the past, conservation efforts have restored much of the wildlife, including elephants, buffalo, Uganda kobs, a variety of antelopes, baboons, chimpanzees, and beautiful tree-climbing lions, which are common sights as well. You can find over 500 different species of birds here, making it the best place for birding. The Park spans approximately 1,978 sq. km (764 sq. miles).
Murchison Falls National Park, bisected by the Nile, the world’s longest river, offers the chance to see the rare Shoebill Stork, and game cruises by boat are rewarded with sightings of Nile crocodiles, hippopotamus, and a host of plains game that come down to the water’s edge to drink. The park is named after the Murchison Falls, where the Nile River is forced through a gap in the rock that is only six meters wide.
Murchison Falls National Park offers a rich diversity of habitats for visitors to explore, including the Nile (the White Nile) and the surrounding papyrus swamps, forests and riverine woodlands. The Falls themselves are spectacular, with the Nile bursting through a six-meter (20 feet) wide gap and plummeting nearly 40 meters (130 feet) over the sheer rock face.
The park is home to over 374 species of birds, including the shoebill stork, among many others. There is an abundance of animal life to be seen—buffalo, elephants, Jackson’s hartebeest, oribis, Uganda kob, lions, leopards, hyenas, reedbuck and bushbuck. At the foot of the Falls on the Nile, hippos and crocodiles are always present. The forest is also home to Uganda’s largest population of chimpanzees. There are also several other species of primate to be seen on game drives and boat cruises as well as on walks in the Budongo and Rabongo forests.
Lake Mburo National Park is one of Uganda’s smaller parks, where the landscape consists mainly of Savannah and acacia woodland. There are five lakes within the park boundaries which account for 20% of the parks surface area and of which Lake Mburo is the largest. The park attracts a particularly diverse array of water birds. The rest of the park is covered with acacia Savannah and is notable for supporting a wide variety of antelope. It is the only place where the impala still occurs in Uganda and it is one of the best places to see eland, Africa’s largest antelope. Large herds of buffalo and zebra are common. Hippos and crocodiles are common in all the lakes around the park.
