The history of Queen Elizabeth National Park

Before the park: salt, cattle and three epidemics

People have lived here since prehistoric times, and UWA says so in its own management plan. The plan's social and economic chapter records that the profusion of fish and animals made the area of the park inhabited by man since prehistoric times, that the Katwe salt lake was the focus of a far-ranging trade which conferred power and riches on local people, and that a century ago the park area was densely settled by pastoralists and fishermen keeping large herds of cattle.

Three waves of disease ended that. UWA's plan names smallpox, rinderpest and outbreaks of trypanosomiasis, which is sleeping sickness, as the cause of the evacuation of most of the population between 1913 and 1914 and again in 1924. With the competition and the hunting removed, wildlife increased. One physical trace of the old settlement is still visible on a game drive: the plan attributes the abundance of the candelabra tree, Euphorbia candelabrum, to its use by pastoralists as living fencing for cattle.

There is a harder account of the same years, and it deserves naming. Wikipedia's article on the park, citing a 2014 Wildlife Conservation Society aerial survey report and a 2021 article in Foreign Policy, describes a 1921 rinderpest and sleeping sickness episode among the Basongora pastoralists, states that the epidemic was believed locally to have been caused by the colonial administration under cover of a livestock vaccination campaign, and says the remaining people were evicted from perhaps 90 per cent of their land, with homes burned and livestock killed, driving them across the border into what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We could not open the underlying WCS report during this check, so we present that version as attributed rather than confirmed. What both accounts agree on is the outcome. The land that became a national park had been cleared of most of its people a generation before anyone drew a park boundary on it.

The push to protect the Lake Edward and Lake George country came from across the border. The Belgian colonial authorities designated Parc National Albert, now Virunga National Park, in the Congo in 1925, and UWA's plan records that this created pressure to protect the contiguous ecosystem on the Ugandan side. Lake George Game Reserve, 689 square kilometres, followed in 1925, and Lake Edward Game Reserve, 559 square kilometres, in 1930.

Kazinga in 1952, Queen Elizabeth in 1954

The common claim is correct, and UWA states it plainly. Continued pressure from the Congo and from parts of the colonial government led to the creation of Kazinga National Park in 1952, made by incorporating Lake George Game Reserve, the area east of the Kasese to Katunguru road on the northern bank of the channel, and Lake Edward Game Reserve, which is today's Ishasha sector. The management plan then says the park's name was changed to Queen Elizabeth National Park in 1954, following the visit of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain.

The legislative trail in the same document is more specific than the story usually told. Queen Elizabeth National Park was first gazetted by Legal Notice No. 159 of 1954, amended by Legal Notice 284 of 1958, substituted by Statutory Instrument No. 209 of 1970 and amended by Statutory Instrument No. 41 of 2003. So the 1952 date is the creation of Kazinga National Park and the 1954 date is the gazettement of the park under its present name. Both are right, and quoting only one of them is where most short histories go wrong.

The visit itself was short. Wikipedia's list of Commonwealth trips by Elizabeth II, drawing on the Royal Household's own record of Commonwealth visits since 1952, dates the Uganda leg to 28 to 30 April 1954, hosted by Sir Andrew Cohen, Governor of the Uganda Protectorate. It was the tail end of the 1953 and 1954 Commonwealth tour, between Aden on 27 April and Malta on 3 May. What we could not confirm is whether the Queen ever entered the park. UWA's park page and its management plan both say the renaming followed her visit to Uganda, without saying she came here, and the detailed itinerary was beyond what we could reach in this check. Operator pages that describe her standing on the Mweya peninsula are describing something we have found no source for.

Two neighbours were created alongside the park and still shape it. Kigezi Game Reserve was established in 1952 from the Lake Edward Game Reserve lands that were left out of the national park, under Legal Notice No. 158 of 1952, and became Kigezi Wildlife Reserve when the Uganda Wildlife Statute of 1996 renamed every game reserve in the country. Kyambura was established as a Controlled Hunting Area in 1963 by Legal Notice No. 363 and gazetted as a game reserve by Statutory Instrument No. 147 of 1965. Together with the park these make up the Queen Elizabeth Protected Area, which is why survey figures for elephant or lion are usually quoted for a larger area than the park alone.

Murchison Falls was created in the same year under the same law, the National Parks Act of 1952, which is why the two parks share a founding date. UWA describes Murchison as one of Uganda's first national parks in 1952 and never enumerates how many there were, so we do not repeat the widespread claim that these were the first two.

In 1979 UNESCO added the park to its Man and the Biosphere network, and the UNESCO record gives 1979 as the year of nomination. UWA's plan is explicit about the reason, and it is the reason this page has a section on the fishing villages: the designation was made in recognition of the relationship between humans and the national park. Note the scale difference before you quote it. UNESCO lists the biosphere reserve at 479,045 hectares, roughly 4,790 square kilometres, which is the wider landscape rather than the park's own 1,978 square kilometres, and gives its population as 416,746 people. UNESCO also gives the altitude range as 910 to 1,390 metres, against UWA's 910 metres at the Lake Edward shore to 1,350 metres at the Katwe explosion craters, while the data panel at the top of UWA's own park page says simply 1,300 metres.

The channel the park was first named after

The Kazinga Channel is a wide natural waterway that drains Lake George south-west into Lake Edward, and the park carried its name for its first two years. Four sources agree on the direction of flow: UWA's management plan, the European Space Agency's imagery note on Lake George, and Wikipedia's articles on both lakes. The two lakes are thought to have been a single larger lake once, split by lava flows from the volcanic fields between them, which would make the channel the last remnant of that union. That origin story comes from Wikipedia and we flag it as such.

It matters more than a connecting stretch of water usually would, because UWA's management plan draws the park boundary in a way that surprises people. Lakes Edward and George themselves lie outside the protected area, while the channel that joins them is part of the park.

Its length is genuinely disputed, and both figures have serious backing. UWA's park page says 40 kilometres, and a 2023 peer-reviewed review of the Lake Edward system by Musinguzi and colleagues gives the same figure. Against that, the European Space Agency says 32 kilometres, and so does the oldest source we found: R. M. Bere, who was the park's own warden, wrote in Oryx in 1959 that the park includes the 20-mile-long Kazinga Channel, and 20 miles is 32.2 kilometres. We give you both and the provenance of each. Wikipedia's 32 kilometres is the same number from a weaker footnote, a tour operator's website, so lean on Bere and ESA rather than on Wikipedia for it. Nobody we found publishes a width, so we do not quote one.

The channel is the reason the boat cruise exists, and the reason the hippo claims exist. Bere's 1959 paper gives a sense of what this place once held: a careful and conservative estimate, he wrote, gives the population of these animals at not less than 14,000, on a park land area of some 760 square miles of which at most 400 could be used by hippo. That was the problem he was writing about, since the park was then culling them.

The superlative you will read everywhere, that this is the highest concentration of hippos in the world, traces back to no census we could find, and Wikipedia's version of it carries a footnote pointing at a BBC article on an unrelated subject. UWA's own park page says hundreds of hippos and makes no record claim. What is properly sourced is a park-wide figure rather than a channel figure: a Wildlife Conservation Society aerial survey flown in May and June 2014 counted 4,155 hippos in the protected area, 2,781 in the north and 1,383 in Ishasha, with a standard error of 1,164 and a caution in the report itself that aerial counts undercount hippos. More recently, UWA's State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026 puts over 77 per cent of Uganda's 9,026 hippos in the Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area, roughly 7,000 animals spread across the lakes, the channel, the Ishasha and Kyambura rivers and the crater lakes.

The wetlands of Lake George were designated in 1988 as Ramsar site number 394, Lake George Wetland, and the European Space Agency describes it as Uganda's first Wetland of International Importance. The Ramsar Information Sheet, filed by Uganda's own Ministry of Environment Protection, gives the site area as approximately 150 square kilometres, while UWA's management plan describes 250 square kilometres of Lake George wetland; the two are measuring different things and we have not been able to reconcile them. Wikipedia gives 4 March 1988 as the designation date, but its footnote for that points at a Ramsar record for a site in Argentina, so we go no further than the year.

The Mbarara to Kasese highway crosses the channel at the Katunguru bridge, which is also where the park headquarters sit. Wikipedia dates the original bridge to 1954 and a rebuild to 2022.

The richest savanna on earth, and then the wars

There is one superlative about this park that stands up, and it is in the past tense. UWA's management plan, citing Cornet D'Elzius 1996 and Plumptre and colleagues 2007, states that the savannas of Queen Elizabeth and the Virunga landscape had the highest biomass of large mammals ever recorded on earth in the 1960s, made up mainly of hippos, elephants and buffalo.

The scale of it created its own problem. The plan records that during the late 1950s and early 1960s hippo numbers rose to the point where culling was required to protect the area from excessive loss of vegetation. Then the wars arrived and solved the problem in the worst available way. The plan's own summary is that populations were decimated drastically during the time of lawlessness between the 1970s and early 1980s, covering the Amin years, the 1979 war that removed him and the unrest that followed.

The numbers below are UWA's, from Table 1 of the management plan. Read the 1980 column against the pre-1973 column and you have the whole decade in one glance. UWA's State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026 tells the elephant part of the same story with a slightly wider opening figure, quoting Douglas-Hamilton and colleagues 1980 for a fall from between 2,500 and 4,000 elephants in the 1960s to just 150 in 1980. The same report puts the wider damage at an estimated 95 per cent decline in savannah wildlife by the mid 1980s compared with the 1960s.

Eric Abe, writing in Pachyderm in 1992, describes the mechanism rather than the arithmetic. Tourism collapsed after the 1971 coup and was banned outright in 1973. With the world price of ivory rising, government officials and security officers began poaching elephants out of the national parks. The Uganda Institute of Ecology flew aerial surveys until 1976, over which three years the elephant estimate for this park fell from about 2,700 to about 700, and then no further surveys were permitted until after Amin's fall. When monitoring resumed in 1980 only 150 elephants were counted here, while 250 were seen immediately across the border in what is now Virunga.

One figure captures how far it went and how far it has come back. Coe and colleagues in 1976 measured the herbivore biomass of this park at roughly 19,000 kilogrammes per square kilometre, the highest recorded anywhere. Lamprey and colleagues put it at about 6,500 by the 1990s, and at about 14,400 on the most recent measurement, which they compare to the Serengeti.

Recovery has been slow and uneven, and the most-quoted modern number needs a date correction that almost every page gets wrong. The 4,711 elephants, give or take 1,106, that you will see attributed to 2023 comes from a survey flown in 2018 and published as a preprint in 2023. It was the first survey here to replace human observers with high-resolution oblique cameras, it came out 62 per cent above the observer-based estimate of about 2,900 from 2014, and the authors are clear that the method changed as well as the population. Carcasses made up just 1.4 per cent of the elephants detected. The same 2018 camera survey counted 14,616 buffalo, 18,613 Uganda kob, 5,826 waterbuck, 1,550 topi and 5,716 hippos, alongside 5,857 cattle and 2,316 goats inside the protected area.

Wildlife population estimates in the Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area ecosystem, 1973 to 2002, from Table 1 of the UWA Queen Elizabeth Protected Area General Management Plan 2011 to 2021 (checked 18 September 2026). Blank cells in UWA's original table are shown here as 'no count'. Survey methods changed repeatedly across this period, so year-on-year jumps are not all real population movements.

The name in the papers from those years

If you go looking for research published on this park in the 1970s and early 1980s, you will not find it under Queen Elizabeth. You will find it under Rwenzori National Park, and that confuses people who assume the two are different places.

An official document settles that the name was real. The Ramsar Information Sheet for Lake George, filed by Uganda in 1988, describes the wetland as lying within Queen Elizabeth, formerly Rwenzori, National Park. UWA's own management plan carries Din 1978 on lion prides near Mweya in Rwenzori National Park and van Orsdol 1981 on lion predation in Rwenzori National Park in its bibliography, and Wikipedia adds Eltringham and Din 1977, Malpas 1981 and Yoaciel and van Orsdol 1981, all using the Rwenzori name in their titles. So the sequence runs Kazinga in 1952, Queen Elizabeth in 1954, Rwenzori through the 1970s and 1980s, and Queen Elizabeth again by 1988 at the latest.

What we could not find is a legal instrument doing the renaming, a date for it, or a date for the reversion to Queen Elizabeth. The management plan's own legislative history for the park runs straight from Legal Notice 159 of 1954 through Statutory Instrument 209 of 1970 to Statutory Instrument 41 of 2003 without mentioning the Rwenzori name at all. Murchison Falls was renamed Kabalega over roughly the same period by a gesture that was never legally promulgated, and this may be the same kind of thing. We could not confirm it.

Anthrax in the hippo population

Anthrax has been killing hippos in this park since at least 1956, and the two outbreaks people remember are the recent end of a long series. The peer-reviewed record, from Driciru and colleagues in PLoS ONE in 2020, counts thirteen historical outbreaks in the protected area between 1956 and 1979, involving 601 recorded wildlife deaths of which 90.1 per cent were hippos and 7.5 per cent buffalo.

The 2004 and 2005 outbreak ran from 25 July 2004 to May 2005. UWA's management plan puts it at at least 300 hippos and estimates a 10 per cent mortality rate, citing Wafula and colleagues 2007, whose own paper gives 306 hippos and calls it 11.63 per cent. The dataset behind Driciru and colleagues 2018 holds 318 hippo deaths for that outbreak, alongside 60 buffalo, 12 Uganda kob, three waterbuck and one elephant.

The 2010 outbreak ran from 11 June to December that year. UWA's plan says it killed 132 hippos. Driciru and colleagues say 137, plus 17 buffalo, two waterbuck and one elephant. Taken together, the two modern outbreaks killed 437 hippos on the published count. We give you both figures for 2010 because the five-animal gap is the kind of small discrepancy that shows you which source a page has actually read.

Anthrax is a soil bacterium, and it concentrates where animals crowd at water, which is exactly what a hippo population on a narrow channel does. Mortality among hippos during an outbreak has run between 21 and 55.5 per cent in the published analyses, which matters here because hippos supply more than half of the total herbivore biomass in this park. There is a practical side for visitors: during an outbreak UWA can restrict boat activities or access to stretches of shoreline, so it is worth asking at the gate if you are travelling when one is reported.

On human infection, the honest answer is that we could not confirm a case count. Driciru and colleagues 2018 say only that infrequent cases in neighbouring communities are presumed to be spillover from infected carcasses, and give no numbers. The nearest documented human toll in the region comes from a 2015 study in Social Science and Medicine, which records a 2011 anthrax outbreak in Sheema district that killed two people and seven cattle, and notes that participants believed prevalence was higher than official reporting showed. We have seen the mechanism you may have read about, hippo meat carrying anthrax into a fishing community, documented properly in Zambia's Luangwa valley in 2011 rather than here.

Whether there has been a further outbreak since 2010 we could not establish. The published datasets stop at 2010, and the 2018 camera survey report notes a high density of carcasses on the Kasenyi plains which it attributes partly to continued anthrax in the populations, without giving an outbreak or a count.

The eleven villages inside the boundary

Eleven fishing villages sit inside or against the park boundary, and they were there before the park was. This is unusual for a national park anywhere, and the arrangement is old, legal and awkward, in UWA's own account of it.

The origin is in the epidemics. UWA's management plan records that during the sleeping sickness clearances some of the fishing villages were not evacuated, and that in recognition of the economic importance of the fishing industry it was in due course decided to allow these villages to persist as enclaves within the park when it was established in 1952. The plan adds a detail that explains much of the friction since: while some enclaves were specifically excluded from the park by the gazettement boundary, others were not.

The villages are Rwenshama, Kisenyi, Katunguru in Kasese district, Kashaka, Kahendero, Kasenyi, Kayanja, Hamukungu, Katunguru in Bushenyi district, Kazinga and Katwe-Kabatoro. Nine of the eleven hold legal status as wildlife sanctuaries. Kashaka was gazetted by Statutory Instrument 59 of 2003, Kisenyi by SI 60, Kahendero by SI 61, Kayanja by SI 62 and Rwenshama by SI 63. Katwe-Kabatoro, Hamukungu, Kasenyi and Katunguru on the Bushenyi side were gazetted as the Kazinga animal sanctuary by Statutory Instrument 226 of 1964, amending Legal Notice 339 of 1959. Kazinga and Katunguru in Kasese have no legal instrument gazetting them as wildlife sanctuaries.

The management plan contradicts itself on that last point. Its law enforcement chapter states that nine of eleven are gazetted and names the two that are not. Its community chapter, forty pages later, states that all of them have the status of wildlife sanctuaries. We give you the more specific version and the fact that UWA disagrees with itself.

The population figures come with the same problem. CARE estimated the total population of these villages at 30,000 in 1999. The same management plan gives two different later figures: 45,000, attributed to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics in 2011, in one chapter, and around 80,000 in another. Of that total, the plan says about 10 per cent are fishermen and 60 per cent are women and children not occupied in any business or trade. The park sits across seven districts with 75 parishes bordering it directly.

What the plan describes as the resulting pressure is specific. Government programmes including NAADS encouraged livestock keeping in villages established as fish landing sites, which brought cattle, goats, pigs and poultry inside the enclaves. That produces predation of livestock by park predators, disease transmission between wildlife and livestock, and competition for water and pasture. Rising population also raises demand for firewood, building poles and ambatch, the light wood used as fishing floats, and the plan lists poor sanitation, poor waste management and the absence of rules to manage the influx of people as further problems. In its tourism analysis UWA lists the presence of fishing villages inside the park as a weakness, on the grounds that it dilutes the wilderness experience.

On the other side of the ledger, the Wildlife Act requires UWA to remit 20 per cent of the revenue collected from park entrance fees to the local governments neighbouring the protected area, as revenue sharing funds for community projects. The management plan records that these funds have risen with visitor numbers and have paid for infrastructure and for income-generating schemes such as goat and pig rearing. UWA's State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026 notes that built-up area inside the park grew markedly between 1990 and 2024, driven partly by park and tourism infrastructure and partly by development within the enclave and fishing communities.

There is also a displacement story attached to the 1954 renaming. Wikipedia, citing a 2021 Foreign Policy article, states that the last communal grazing rights of the Basongora herders were rescinded at that point, that thousands moved across the border into Virunga with their herds, and that many only began returning after 1964. The same source says that Basongora families driven back out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2006 settled with their livestock inside the park north of Lake Edward, and that predator attacks on their animals without compensation led to poisoned carcasses being left out. That thread runs directly into the lion section below. We flag the whole of it as attributed to a news source through Wikipedia rather than confirmed from a primary document.

The salt works at Lake Katwe are part of the same picture. UWA's plan describes Lake Katwe as famous for its artisanal salt industry, names the Katwe salt lake as the historical focus of a wide trading network, and states elsewhere that viable quantities of crude salt exist in Lake Katwe and Lake Bunyampaka where mining has been going on. Current production figures, the licensing arrangement and the boundary between the salt pans and the park are things we could not verify in this check.

We are not going to tell you what to make of any of this. The facts are that people were cleared off this land by disease and by administration before the park existed, that the fishing villages that survived the clearances were left in place by a deliberate decision in 1952, that nine of them hold gazetted legal status and two do not, that the population inside has grown several times over, and that UWA describes both a revenue-sharing obligation towards those communities and a management problem created by them. The judgement is yours.

Oil: what UWA itself has written

There is no oil production inside Queen Elizabeth. Exploration reached the park, one well was drilled in 2010 and found nothing commercially viable, and the most recent national report from UWA names oil development at Murchison Falls rather than here. That is the answer. The detail is worth reading, because UWA wrote a good deal of it down itself.

The management plan's petroleum chapter states that exploration in Uganda has been ongoing since 2000 within the Albertine Graben, that the graben overlaps several protected areas including this one, and that the Queen Elizabeth Protected Area falls under blocks 4A, 4B and 4C. Exploration started in the southern part of the park, block 4B, which includes the Ishasha sector where the tree-climbing lions are. Seismic studies in 2007 and 2008 indicated a possibility of hydrocarbons, and four prospective drill sites were identified: Ngaji near Rwenshama, Nkobe near Katooke gate on the road to Ishasha, Mpundu at the edge of the park boundary at Kikarara, and Kiremu in Maramagambo forest. In June 2010 exploratory drilling was carried out at the Ngaji well, though no viable quantities of hydrocarbons were found. Drilling of the other wells was to follow a planned infill seismic study.

The plan's zoning chapter adds a line that puts the scale of the licensing in perspective. Oil and gas activities were not zoned, it says, because all three blocks cover almost the entire national park. Areas where oil activities had already occurred were placed in the recovery zone.

UWA's own list of the risks is unusually blunt for an official document. It names land take for drill sites, camps, seismic surveys, drilling and road networks; habitat and niche destruction; increased human and vehicular traffic; noise from heavy machinery; alteration in animal behaviour, distribution and ranging; and pollution from hazardous wastes. It then states that the activities of oil exploration are likely to have negative impacts on the integrity of the protected area as a refugium, on its biodiversity, environment, water catchment protection and ecosystem services. The same chapter also states the case for the other side in UWA's words: petroleum resources have a great potential to cause national development and improve community livelihoods.

What UWA said it would do about it was monitoring rather than opposition. The plan commits to an oil field monitoring unit with its own staff and offices, training in exploration impact mitigation, water and air quality testing equipment and a basic laboratory, a sensitivity atlas for the protected area, baseline biodiversity studies, a monitoring checklist, and joint work with NEMA and the Petroleum Exploration and Production Department on environmental restoration and company compliance.

One piece of provenance belongs on the record without comment. This management plan was itself prepared with funds from the Oil for Development programme of the Government of Norway, under a project titled Strengthening the management of Oil and Gas Sector in Uganda, and its acknowledgements name the Commissioner of the Petroleum Exploration and Production Department among the contributors.

As we checked it in September 2026: UWA's State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026 names oil and gas infrastructure development, specifically EACOP, Tilenga and Kingfisher, as an emerging threat in the Murchison Falls and Bugoma landscape, and names no oil development inside Queen Elizabeth. Our own Murchison Falls guide covers that project in detail. What we could not establish here is the current licence status of blocks 4A, 4B and 4C, who holds them now, and whether any further drilling followed the infill seismic study the 2011 plan describes. Our web search allowance for this session ran out before we reached the Petroleum Authority of Uganda's licensing material, so that gap is a gap in our checking rather than evidence that nothing has happened.

The management plan expired in 2021 and UWA has not published a replacement that we can find, which means the most detailed official account of oil in this park is now fifteen years old.

The poisoned lions

Start with a correction, because this one is repeated everywhere. The March 2021 poisoning happened in the Ishasha sector. The larger 2018 poisoning, often described as an Ishasha incident, happened at the other end of the park, in the north near Hamukungu, a fishing enclave on Lake George, roughly a hundred kilometres away.

The pattern is older than either. UWA's management plan records that in 2010 the park lost over ten lions at once, and attributes poisoning by neighbouring communities, particularly the fishing communities, to the aim of preventing livestock losses.

On 11 April 2018 eleven lions were found dead in the park near Hamukungu: three lionesses and eight cubs from the same pride. Mongabay, reporting on 17 April 2018, described suspected poisoned meat, put the motive as retaliation after lions attacked livestock, and named the absence of compensation for killed stock as the underlying grievance. The tourism minister at the time, Ephraim Kamuntu, reported the deaths to the police. UWA's spokesman Bashir Hangi was quoted calling the loss of eleven animals at once a big loss for the country as a whole rather than for the authority alone. No source we read named the poison, so we do not name it either.

Around 19 March 2021, announced on 20 March, six lions were found dead and mutilated in the Ishasha sector, with most of their body parts removed. The poison killed vultures at the carcasses too, which is the standard signature of poisoned bait, and the vulture count differs between sources: eight in the news reporting, ten in the statement from the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The motive attributed by UWA and by IFAW was trade in body parts, which makes it a different crime from the 2018 killings. UWA arrested four suspects on 23 March 2021, three days after the deaths were announced, and IFAW credited community members with identifying them. No source we read reports a conviction, and we could not confirm the outcome of the case.

It has continued. UWA's State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026 records that in December 2025 four lions were poisoned in the park in retaliation for livestock predation.

What has followed is a population problem and a partnership. The same 2026 report puts the fall in the park's lion population at 45.07 per cent over five years, names poisoning and trade in body parts among the main causes, and records a national decline from 373 lions in 2020 to 291 in the 2022 and 2023 census. The report also states that 93 individual lions in 22 known prides were identified and monitored in the conservation area as of 2025, and is careful to say that this higher figure reflects the accuracy of individual identification and long-term monitoring rather than a sudden population increase. A 2024 spatial capture-recapture study led by Braczkowski, published in Global Ecology and Conservation, put the conservation area's lion population below 40 on a different method. Set the 93 against the 40 without the methodology and you will read a recovery that nobody is claiming.

In September 2026 UWA and the Wildlife Conservation Society signed a ten-year co-management partnership for the Ishasha sector specifically, covering wildlife protection, habitat restoration, tourism development and reduction of human-wildlife conflict. Trade press reporting on 15 September 2026 said the programme keeps open the possibility of translocating lions into Ishasha to supplement the remaining population, subject to scientific assessment and consultation with neighbouring communities, with Uganda retaining ownership. The exact commencement date of the ten years has not been published.

Poison is not the only thing that has killed lions here. The management plan records die-offs in 1994 and serological surveillance in 1998 and 1999 that found canine distemper in the population, alongside high seroprevalence for several feline viruses, and it lists road collisions on the highway through the park as a further cause of death.

What you can see of this history today

The channel is the oldest exhibit, and the launch cruise from Mweya runs the water the park was originally named after. The peninsula the boats leave from sits between Lake Edward and the channel, which is the geography the whole park is organised around.

At Katunguru you cross the channel on the bridge that carries the public highway, with the park headquarters beside it and the fishing village on the bank. There are few places in African conservation where a national road, a park headquarters and a gazetted village inside a national park sit within sight of each other.

Ishasha is where three threads meet: the old Lake Edward Game Reserve that became this sector in 1952, the fig trees the lions climb, and the southern exploration block where the Ngaji well was drilled in 2010. It is also the sector now covered by the ten-year partnership signed in September 2026.

Kyambura Gorge carries a more recent scar. The isolated chimpanzee group in the gorge was cut off in the 1990s, when the migration corridor to Kasyoha-Kitomi Forest Reserve and Maramagambo was settled and cleared for agriculture, and UWA's management plan lists the isolation of that population as a recognised management problem rather than a curiosity.

In the north-west, the flat grassland bordering Lake George carries contamination from the copper and cobalt stockpiles of the former Kilembe mines, which eroded into the park after mining stopped in the 1970s. Vegetation has regrown since the Kasese Cobalt Company began processing the stockpiles, and UWA's plan says openly that the level of heavy metal contamination in the soil and in the regrowth is not known.

And at Katwe the salt pans are still worked by hand in a crater beside the park, in an industry that was trading across this region long before anything here was gazetted.

Sources

• UWA: Queen Elizabeth Protected Area General Management Plan 2011 to 2021, PDF, 242 pages (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• UWA: State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026, PDF, published April 2026 (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• UWA: Queen Elizabeth National Park, park page, for area, channel length and hippo wording (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Wikipedia: Queen Elizabeth National Park, for the Rwenzori National Park naming and the Basongora account (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Wikipedia: Kazinga Channel, for the disputed 32 kilometre length and the bridge dates (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• UNESCO Man and the Biosphere: Queen Elizabeth Biosphere Reserve, nominated 1979 (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Ramsar Information Sheet, Lake George Wetland, Uganda, site 394, PDF, filed 1988 (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Bere, R. M. (1959): Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda, the hippopotamus problem and experiment, Oryx 5(3), 116 to 124, DOI 10.1017/S0030605300000454 (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Musinguzi et al. (2023): State of knowledge of aquatic ecosystem and fisheries of the Lake Edward System, Aquaculture Fish and Fisheries, DOI 10.1002/aff2.140, for the 40 kilometre channel length (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• European Space Agency: Lake George, Uganda, for the channel length, flow direction and the 1988 Ramsar designation (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Wanyama et al. (2014): Aerial surveys of the Greater Virunga Landscape, Wildlife Conservation Society, for the 2014 hippo count (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Wikipedia: List of Commonwealth official trips made by Elizabeth II, for the 28 to 30 April 1954 Uganda dates (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Mongabay, 17 April 2018: Suspected poisoning takes down 11 lions in Uganda park (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• NPR, 20 March 2021: 6 lions found dead in Ugandan national park (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• IFAW: Uganda Wildlife Authority arrests suspects in lion killing (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Braczkowski et al. 2024, Global Ecology and Conservation: Insights into large carnivore populations in Uganda, DOI 10.1016/j.gecco.2024.e03312 (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Tourism Update, 15 September 2026: Ishasha targets recovery of tree-climbing lions (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Foreign Policy, April 2021: When Nature Conservation Goes Wrong, cited via Wikipedia for the Basongora account (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• UWA Conservation Tariff July 2024 to June 2026, PDF (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Driciru et al. (2018): Spatio-temporal epidemiology of anthrax in Hippopotamus amphibius in Queen Elizabeth Protected Area, PLoS ONE 13(11) e0206922 (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Driciru et al. (2020): Environmental determinants influencing anthrax distribution in Queen Elizabeth Protected Area, PLoS ONE 15(8) e0237223, for the 13 outbreaks between 1956 and 1979 (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Wafula, Patrick & Tumwesigye (2007): Managing the 2004/05 anthrax outbreak in Queen Elizabeth and Lake Mburo National Parks, African Journal of Ecology, DOI 10.1111/j.1365-2028.2007.00796.x (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Coffin et al. (2015): A One Health, participatory epidemiology assessment of anthrax management in Western Uganda, Social Science & Medicine 129, for the 2011 Sheema district human deaths (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Abe, E. (1992): The Status of Elephants in Uganda: Queen Elizabeth National Park, Pachyderm 15, 49 to 52 (checked 18 Sep 2026)
• Lamprey, Keigwin & Tumwesigye (2023 preprint, survey flown 2018): A high-resolution aerial camera survey of Queen Elizabeth Protected Area, bioRxiv, DOI 10.1101/2023.02.06.525067. Not peer reviewed (checked 18 Sep 2026)