Ruaha National Park

Ruaha National Park is Tanzania’s largest and biggest national park located Central Tanzania, 128km (80 miles) west of Iringa.
This relatively new and undisturbed park is one of Tanzania’s largest elephant sanctuaries.
Its name derives from the great Ruaha River which flows along its entire eastern border creating spectacular gorges and scenery.
Hippos, crocodiles and fish inhabit the river.

The park is rich in all forms of wildlife except some of the typical plains animals such as Thomson’s gazelle, wildebeest and topi whose range does not extend into this area.

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 Africa 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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