Month by month
Queen Elizabeth in February
February is the hottest month of the year here and the last one before the calendar breaks. It ends at 36 mm; March opens at 213 mm. Nothing else in the year turns that hard.
If you only want the answer
February averages 36 mm over three rain days and 29.4 degrees in the afternoon, the highest daytime average of the twelve months. It is the last dependable month for the southern murram before the long rains, and it is the last full month of the northern migrant season.
Queen Elizabeth weather in February: the hottest afternoons of the year
At 29.4 degrees, February has the highest average daytime maximum on the thirty-year record for this park, nearly three degrees above November at 26.6. Nights sit at 19.7, also the warmest of the year, so there is little relief after dark either. Against that, a park sitting at around 1,300 metres of elevation is never brutal in the way a low-lying valley is, and the water is everywhere: Lake Edward, Lake George, the Kazinga Channel and the crater lakes.
Plan the day around the heat rather than through it. The first and last two hours of daylight are when the animals move and when the light works, and the middle of the day in February is when the Kazinga Channel launch, at $30 per person for a roughly two-hour run from the Mweya marina, earns its place in the itinerary.
The last dependable month for the road south
February is the closing of a window. The run from Mweya to the Ishasha sector is about 109 km, of which a good part is murram, and from March onwards it becomes the slowest and least predictable stretch of road in the park. Anyone whose trip depends on reaching the tree-climbing lions on a particular day should be looking at February, June or July.
The Ishasha lions themselves number 20 to 30 individuals according to monitoring by the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Uganda Carnivore Program and UWA, and the same assessment calls the trend relatively stable. No official source publishes a sighting success rate, so treat the plan rather than the odds as the thing you control: sleep at or near Ishasha so you get a morning and a late afternoon, instead of passing through for two hours.
The migrants are still here, and then they are not
The Palearctic waders, gulls and terns that arrive from September stay through April, so February is still a full month for them, layered on top of a resident list of over 600 species. February is also the month when the grass is at its shortest and thinnest, which matters for a park where the giant forest hog on the northern Kazinga flats and the topi in Ishasha are both easier to pick out of low cover.
One caution on the topi. The Ishasha population collapsed from 1,521 animals in 2006 to 262 in 2010 according to UWA's own management plan, and no more recent count has been published. February gives you the visibility, and it cannot give you the numbers that once made the southern sector famous for them.