Queen Elizabeth National Park is one of Uganda’s most popular national parks combining beautiful scenery with some of the best wildlife viewing in the country. The park stretches from the crater-dotted foothills of the Rwenzori ranges in the north, along the shores of Lake Edward to the remote Ishasha river in the south, incorporating a wide variety of habitats that range from wetlands and savanna to lowland forest. The lush savanna of Queen Elizabeth National Park offers prime grazing to big plains wildlife such as buffaloes, elephants, various antelopes including Ugandan kobs, bushbucks, topi and defassas as well as more than 20 predators like lions, leopards, spotted hyenas and side-striped jackals. The park also supports wide a variety of more than 600 bird species.
One of the highlights of Uganda’s most popular and accessible savanna reserve is the Kazinga channel that bisects the park and joins Lake George and Lake Edward. The channel offers the superb opportunity of close up wildlife encounters with hippos mere feet away from the boat while elephants and buffaloes as well as an array of other mammals visit the channel’s shoreline. The shores of the channel are also home to many bird species, including pink backed pelicans, pied and malachite kingfishers and saddle billed storks.
The southern part of the park incorporates the Ishasha sector, a contrast to that of the Mweya peninsula, Kasenyi and the Crater Lakes areas of the park. Ishasha is a vast low-lying savanna plain lying south of the equator in the Albertine Rift Valley, known for its tree climbing lions consisting of around 40 individuals split across three prides. Ishasha is one of only two areas in the world where this amazing behaviour occurs; the other is in Lake Manyara National Park in southern Tanzania.