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Ruaha National Park
The game viewing starts the moment the plane
touches down. A giraffe races beside the airstrip, all legs and
neck, yet oddly elegant in its awkwardness. A line of zebras parades
across the runway in the giraffe's wake.
In the distance, beneath a bulbous baobab tree,
a few representatives of Ruaha's 10,000 elephants - the largest
population of any East African national park, form a protective
huddle around their young.
Second only to Katavi in its aura of
untrammelled wilderness, but far more accessible, Ruaha protects a
vast tract of the rugged, semi-arid bush country that characterises
central Tanzania. Its lifeblood is the Great Ruaha River, which
courses along the eastern boundary in a flooded torrent during the
height of the rains, but dwindling thereafter to a scattering of
precious pools surrounded by a blinding sweep of sand and rock.
A fine network of game-viewing roads follows the
Great Ruaha and its seasonal tributaries, where , during the dry
season, impala, waterbuck and other antelopes risk their life for a
sip of life-sustaining water. And the risk is considerable: not only
from the prides of 20-plus lion that lord over the savannah, but
also from the cheetahs that stalk the open grassland and the
leopards that lurk in tangled riverine thickets. This impressive
array of large predators is boosted by both striped and spotted
hyena, as well as several conspicuous packs of the highly endangered
African wild dog.
Ruaha's unusually high diversity of antelope is
a function of its location, which is transitional to the acacia
savannah of East Africa and the miombo woodland belt of Southern
Africa. Grant's gazelle and lesser kudu occur here at the very south
of their range, alongside the miombo-associated sable and roan
antelope, and one of East AfricaÆs largest populations of greater
kudu, the park emblem, distinguished by the male's magnificent
corkscrew horns.
A similar duality is noted in the checklist of
450 birds: the likes of crested barbet, an attractive
yellow-and-black bird whose persistent trilling is a characteristic
sound of the southern bush, occur in Ruaha alongside central
Tanzanian endemics such as the yellow-collared lovebird and ashy
starling.
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