Wildlife in Queen Elizabeth National Park

The hippo claim, and what the documents actually say

The Kazinga Channel is described almost everywhere as holding the highest concentration of hippos in the world. We went looking for the survey behind that sentence and did not find one. There is no count, no paper and no UWA document that measures hippo density in the channel and compares it with anywhere else.

The best-known place the claim appears is Wikipedia, whose article on the Kazinga Channel calls it one of the world's largest concentrations of hippos. The footnote attached to that sentence points to a BBC article about a political dispute in the Rwenzururu kingdom, which is a different subject entirely. UWA's own park page, checked on 18 September 2026, says only hundreds of hippos, and gives the channel as 40 kilometres long where Wikipedia gives 32. Without an agreed length, a figure per kilometre cannot be worked out at all. The counts of 2,000, 1,600 and 5,000 that circulate for the channel itself trace back to operator pages with no source attached to any of them.

Here is the figure that does hold up. UWA's State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026, published in April 2026, puts the national hippo population at 9,026 animals, up from 8,226 in 2021 and 2022, and states that more than 77 per cent of them live in the Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area. That works out at roughly 6,950 hippos here. The percentage and the national total are UWA's; the multiplication is ours. It covers the whole conservation area, meaning Lake Edward, Lake George, the Kazinga Channel, the Ishasha and Kyambura rivers and the crater lakes together, and UWA publishes nothing for individual water bodies.

There is one superlative about this landscape that carries a citation, and it belongs in the past tense. UWA's General Management Plan for the protected area, 2011 to 2021, 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 primarily of hippopotamuses, elephants and buffalos, citing Cornet D'Elzius 1996 and Plumptre et al. 2007b. What happened afterwards is in the same plan. Hippo numbers had risen far enough by the late 1950s and early 1960s that culling was required to protect the area from excessive vegetation loss. Anthrax then killed at least 300 hippos in 2004 and 2005, an estimated ten per cent of the population, and another 132 in 2010. The plan's own series runs 2,200 in 1988/89, 2,800 in 1995, 2,900 in 1999, 3,400 in 2000, 2,632 in 2004 and 5,024 in 2006.

Anthrax has a practical side worth knowing before you book a boat. During an outbreak UWA can restrict boat activities or access to stretches of shoreline, so ask at the gate if you are travelling while one is being reported.

Sighting odds on a typical three-night visit

Green means you would be unlucky to miss it, amber and terracotta mean it depends on the sector and the day, and grey means the animal is not in this park whatever you have read elsewhere. These odds assume a normal itinerary: game drives on the Kasenyi plains, the Kazinga Channel cruise, the Crater Drive, and either a night in Ishasha or a trek into Kyambura Gorge.

UWA's own species total disagrees with itself. The park page and the management plan's tourism SWOT say 95 mammal species; paragraph 2.6 of that same plan says 96 species of mammals recorded in QEPA. Over 95 covers both. The park page also gives 20 carnivore species.

• Hippopotamus Guaranteed The channel cruise settles it; over 77 per cent of Uganda's hippos are in this conservation area
• Buffalo Guaranteed Herds on the Kasenyi plains and along the channel
• Uganda kob Guaranteed The Kasenyi plains are the park's main kob ground
• Waterbuck Guaranteed Along the channel and on the Ishasha circuits
• Warthog Guaranteed Everywhere, including the verges of the public road
• Olive baboon Guaranteed On the roads and in Kyambura Gorge
• Vervet monkey Guaranteed Around Mweya and the lodges
• African elephant Very likely Uganda's largest population; 4,711 in a survey flown in 2018 and published in 2023
• Nile crocodile Very likely UWA names it among the park's core species; look on the channel banks
• Giant forest hog Very likely UWA names it among the animals most often seen on the northern Kazinga plains
• Lion Good chance Kasenyi in the north, the fig trees of Ishasha in the south
• Topi Good chance An Ishasha speciality; the count fell from 1,521 in 2006 to 262 in 2010
• Black-and-white colobus Good chance Kyambura Gorge and the Maramagambo forest
• Red-tailed monkey Good chance In the gorge forest at Kyambura
• Spotted hyaena Good chance Dawn, dusk and night drives shift the odds
• Chimpanzee Takes luck Only on a Kyambura trek, never on a game drive
• Leopard Takes luck Recorded park-wide and seen rarely
• Ugandan red colobus Takes luck Within the protected area its range is limited to Dura
• Giraffe Not here UWA's 2026 report names four Ugandan populations and this is not one
• Zebra Not here UWA names four protected areas holding zebra; this is not among them
• Cheetah Not here Appears nowhere as a wild population in UWA's 2026 report
• African wild dog Not here Treated as extinct in Uganda apart from a 2023 pair in Kidepo
• Impala Not here Lake Mburo and Pian Upe only
• Eland Not here Kidepo Valley and Lake Mburo only
• Wildebeest Not here Does not occur anywhere in Uganda

An itinerary that stays in the north around Mweya and Kasenyi drops topi and the gorge primates off this list, and an Ishasha-only visit drops the channel species. Species silhouettes from PhyloPic (CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA).

Lions: three counts, three answers

In the Ishasha sector there are 20 to 30 lions, from monitoring by the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Uganda Carnivore Program and UWA, published on 4 January 2022. For the park as a whole there are three published figures and they contradict each other, so all three are here with their source and their year.

UWA's State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026 identifies 93 individual lions across 22 known prides in the Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area as of 2025: 28 adult males, 36 adult females, and 33 subadults and cubs. Braczkowski and colleagues, in Global Ecology and Conservation of December 2024, put it at fewer than 40 for the same conservation area using spatial capture-recapture across a participatory survey involving more than 100 people from 20 organisations. The same team recorded a fall from about 72 animals to 39 over 2018 to 2022, close to half in under five years. A separate Volcanoes Safaris Partnership Trust survey detected 28 adult lions over 7,405 kilometres of searching in 110 days between 7 August and 25 November 2023.

UWA addresses the gap itself, and its answer is the method rather than the animals. Its report states that the improved estimates reflect the increased accuracy of individual identification and long-term monitoring approaches, rather than a sudden population increase. So 93 set against 39 is a difference in how the counting was done, and reading it as recovery would be reading it wrong. The same report records a 45.07 per cent decline for Queen Elizabeth over five years, against a national fall from 373 lions in 2020 to 291 in the 2022 and 2023 census, and names poisoning and trade in body parts as the causes.

The older Ishasha counts are in Table 4 of the management plan: 34 lions in about 80 square kilometres in 1977, 30 in 1978 and 39 in 1979, all from van Orsdol, then 29 in a 128 square kilometre count area in 1999 and 23 in 2000 to 2002 from the Lion Project. Trade media reported about 80 lions in Ishasha in the 1970s in September 2026 without naming a source, which sits above every published count from those years.

The tree climbing itself is in the official record. UWA's management plan states that the protected area has a high number of tree-climbing lions in the Ishasha sector compared with any other park in Uganda, that the behaviour is rare and uncommon, and that ficus is the most favoured tree species for climbing. No official or scientific source publishes a success rate for seeing them, so we do not give one and you should treat any percentage you are offered as unsourced. What is fixed is the arithmetic: 20 to 30 animals in a tourist area that UWA's own counts put at 80 to 128 square kilometres, with guides who know the trees. Plan at least one night in or near Ishasha so you have a morning and a late afternoon.

Two footnotes from the management plan. It designated a Special Climbing Lion Zone in the southern Ishasha circuit where off-track driving would be allowed at a higher fee, because tourists were driving off the tracks illegally to get closer. Whether that zone and its fee were ever introduced is unconfirmed; no off-track line for Ishasha appears in the 2024 to 2026 tariff. And the park has other losses on record: die-offs in 1994, canine distemper confirmed by serosurveillance in 1998 and 1999 (Driciru et al. 2004), and road deaths from speeding traffic on the public highway.

Poisoning, four times over

Poisoning is the pattern behind the lion figures rather than a one-off event, and four incidents are documented between 2010 and 2025 with two separate motives behind them.

In 2010 the park lost more than ten lions at once, recorded in UWA's management plan, which attributes it to indiscriminate poisoning by neighbouring communities, particularly the fishing communities, to prevent livestock losses. On 11 April 2018, eleven lions were found dead inside the park near Hamukungu, a fishing village enclave on Lake George in the north of the park: three lionesses and eight cubs from the same pride. Mongabay reported it on 17 April 2018 as suspected poisoned meat, following attacks on livestock, with the absence of compensation for lost cattle named as the underlying cause. The then Minister of Tourism, Ephraim Kamuntu, reported it to the police, and UWA spokesman Bashir Hangi described losing eleven at once as a big loss for the country as a whole.

Around 19 March 2021, six lions were found dead and mutilated in the Ishasha sector with most of their body parts removed, made public on 20 March and reported by NPR and UPI. The poison killed vultures too, eight according to the news reporting and ten according to IFAW's statement. The motive here was trade in body parts, which is a different motive from 2018. UWA arrested four suspects on 23 March 2021, three days after the deaths were made public, and IFAW credited both the speed of the arrests and the community members who identified the suspects. No source we consulted reports a conviction. In December 2025, four lions were poisoned in the conservation area as a retaliatory action due to livestock predation, recorded in UWA's April 2026 report.

The type of poison used has not been confirmed in any source for any of these incidents, so no chemical is named here.

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 reduced human and wildlife conflict. The programme explicitly leaves open the possibility of lion translocations to supplement the remaining population, subject to scientific justification and consultation with neighbouring communities, with Uganda retaining ownership. The exact start date of the ten years has not been published.

Elephants: from 150 animals to 4,711

The best current figure is 4,711 elephants in the Queen Elizabeth Protected Area, with a 95 per cent confidence interval of plus or minus 1,106, and it is the highest count since surveys began in the 1950s and 1960s. Note the dating: the survey was flown in 2018 and only published in 2023, so the figure is older than it looks wherever you see it quoted. Lamprey, Keigwin and Tumwesigye published it in 2023 from the first high-resolution aerial camera survey of the protected area.

Read the method before you read the trend. Human observers in the back seats were replaced by Oblique Camera Count systems angled at 40 to 45 degrees, producing 43,000 images along transects spaced a kilometre apart at 28 per cent sampling intensity, and the relative error margin improved from 43 to 23 per cent. The result sits 62 per cent above the previous observer-based estimate of 2,900 from 2014. Most of that jump is the camera rather than new elephants, which is the same trap as the lion numbers. The paper is a preprint on bioRxiv; a related paper on the same image dataset was peer reviewed in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution in October 2023, and the exact field date of the count is not stated in the abstract.

The history underneath is the stronger story. Queen Elizabeth held 2,500 to 4,000 elephants in the 1960s and 150 by 1980, after the killing during the civil wars and the years of political instability, recorded in UWA's 2026 report citing Douglas-Hamilton et al. 1980. The management plan's own series then runs 400 in 1988/89, 1,100 in 1995, 1,300 in 1999, 998 in 2002, 2,497 in 2004, 2,959 in 2006 and 2,502 in 2010.

One tension is worth carrying with you when you read national totals. UWA gives 6,352 elephants for the whole of Uganda in 2023 to 2025, down 4.06 per cent from 6,621, and names Queen Elizabeth as the largest population followed by Murchison Falls. If the camera figure of 4,711 sat inside that national total, this park would hold three quarters of Uganda's elephants, which does not square with Murchison. The national estimate almost certainly rests on the lower observer-based counts. Both numbers stand, each with its method attached.

Two further findings from the same camera survey and the management plan. The invasive grass Imperata cylindrica covers 50 per cent of the grassland area, alongside a high density of bone fields pointing to high mortality from disease and the continuing invasion. And the main elephant corridors out of the protected area, at Muhokya, Dura, Bwera, Katerera and Ishasha, which once connected it to protected areas in DR Congo, Kibale and Kasyoha-Kitomi, are largely broken. When numbers fell here it was always assumed the animals had crossed into Congo, and counts across the Greater Virunga landscape over the same period showed the same decline, so they had gone rather than moved.

The Kyambura chimpanzees, and why nobody can quote you the odds

No source publishes a success rate for the Kyambura trek. Not UWA, not the researchers, and not the company that sells it. The fifty per cent figure that gets quoted has nothing behind it either, so treat any percentage you are given as invented.

The group is small and it has been cut off since the 1990s. UWA's own management plan gives two different numbers within forty pages of each other: paragraph 3.1.5 calls it an isolated group of 20 endangered chimpanzees, and paragraph 3.1.2 calls it an isolated small group of 21 endangered chimpanzees. Volcanoes Safaris, which runs the monitoring in the gorge through its partnership trust and also sells the trek, says 30 individuals. Roughly twenty to thirty is as precise as the sources allow.

The plan explains the isolation plainly: this group of chimps was cut off in the 1990s when their migratory corridor to Kasyoha-Kitomi forest reserve and Maramagambo was settled and extensively degraded for agriculture. UWA lists the isolated population in Kyambura Gorge as one of the park's own monitoring problems, so this is a recognised management issue rather than a travel story. Inbreeding in such a small closed gene pool is widely raised, but we found no peer-reviewed viability analysis for this group, which means there is no published extinction risk and no published timeframe. The first permanent, scientifically designed monitoring programme for these animals, run by the Volcanoes Safaris Partnership Trust with UWA from the research centre at Kyambura Gorge Lodge, only launched in April 2026, which says something about how thin the data under every number above is.

Volcanoes Safaris describes the animals as less well habituated than chimpanzee communities in Kibale National Park, which makes for an exciting and adventurous hike. The trek takes two to five hours from the park headquarters. At Kibale you track a community of hundreds habituated over decades; at Kyambura you track twenty to thirty animals in an eleven-kilometre gorge, and park entry is charged separately here where Kibale includes it.

The gorge is the reason to go. UWA's description is worth quoting: within the Kyambura Gorge and its escarpment banks, rising from the riverbed grows a belt of spectacular underground riparian forest, typical of a tropical rainforest in the heart of the savanna grassland, completely hidden from the outside world. Red-tailed monkeys, black-and-white colobus, vervets and olive baboons live there too, and elephants, hippos, buffalo and lions move through it.

Birds: over 600 species, and this claim holds

Over 600 species, and the claim that this is the longest bird list in Uganda stands up with a primary source behind it. UWA's management plan states that its diversity is reflected in its over 600 species list, the highest number of species recorded in any IBA in Uganda and probably the highest of any Protected Area in Africa, citing Byaruhanga, Kasoma and Pomeroy 2001, Important Bird Areas in Uganda. The word probably is in the original and it attaches to the Africa-wide half of the sentence, so that half stays a supposition here as well. The Uganda claim has separate support in UWA's Kidepo brochure, which describes Kidepo's 475 species as second in Uganda only to Queen Elizabeth's 604.

UWA gives four different totals across its own documents: 600+ on the park page, 604 in that Kidepo brochure, 610 twice in the management plan, and 612 in the same plan's tourism SWOT. Over 600 covers all four, which is why we use it rather than picking one. An independent cross-check against the Avibase checklist was not possible; the page returns a 403 error.

The supporting detail is unusually good for a park bird list. The protected area holds more than half of all the bird species recorded in Uganda. Kyambura Wildlife Reserve on its own has 332 recorded species, six of them globally threatened and 110 of them wetland species (Allan 1994, in Byaruhanga et al. 2001). Maramagambo Forest supports 194 species (MUIENR 1992). The wetlands on the north shore of Lake George, 250 square kilometres of them, have been on the Ramsar list of wetlands of international importance since 1988. A birding or nature walk costs $25 for a foreign non-resident, $20 for a foreign resident and UGX 20,000 for East Africans, with the guide included in the fee.

What is not here

Eight animals that visitors regularly expect in Queen Elizabeth do not live in it, and the evidence for each is UWA's own State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026, which reports these species protected area by protected area.

Giraffe: the report covers Nubian giraffe by site and names only Murchison Falls with 2,250, Kidepo Valley with 163 in 2025, Lake Mburo with 64 and Pian Upe with 42. Queen Elizabeth appears in neither the text nor the chart. Zebra: the report says the population is stable and found in only four protected areas, namely Lake Mburo, Kidepo Valley, Pian Upe and Katonga, and this park is not one of them. Cheetah: across all 190 pages of the report, cheetah does not appear as a wild population anywhere in Uganda. African wild dog: the report treats the species as having been considered extinct in Uganda, with a single recent confirmation of a pair at the Narus in Kidepo Valley on 26 June 2023, more than 600 kilometres away, and UWA leaves open whether those animals were passing through or resident.

Ostrich: Uganda's 1,412 ostriches are in the Karamoja complex in the north-east, on the other side of the country. Impala: Uganda's impala are in Lake Mburo, with 92 reintroduced to Pian Upe in 2018 and 2019, and Queen Elizabeth is named nowhere as impala country. Eland: recorded only in Kidepo Valley, with 127 animals, and Lake Mburo. Wildebeest: the species does not appear in UWA's Ugandan species accounts at all, so anyone arriving with the Serengeti migration in mind is in the wrong country for it. That last one rests on absence from the national report rather than on an explicit denial, so we hold it a little more loosely than the others.

One more, because it is a booking error rather than a wildlife question. Uganda's 459 mountain gorillas are in Bwindi Impenetrable and Mgahinga Gorilla national parks. Queen Elizabeth sits on the route between them and the rest of the country, and it has no gorillas. If gorillas are the point of your trip, the permit and the park are somewhere else.

Sources

• UWA: Queen Elizabeth National Park
• UWA: State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026 (PDF)
• UWA: Queen Elizabeth Protected Area General Management Plan 2011 to 2021 (PDF)
• Braczkowski et al., Global Ecology and Conservation, December 2024: lions, leopards and hyenas by spatial capture-recapture
• Wildlife Conservation Society Uganda: Unique Tree-Climbing Lions Roar Again in Uganda, January 2022
• Lamprey, Keigwin & Tumwesigye 2023: high-resolution aerial camera survey of the Queen Elizabeth Protected Area
• Mongabay, April 2018: suspected poisoning takes down 11 lions in Uganda park
• IFAW, March 2021: Uganda Wildlife Authority arrests over lion killing