ABOUT SERENGETI NATIONAL PARK
Serengeti national park located in Tanzania was established in 1930 as a game reserve. Originally it comprised an area of 2,286 square kilometers. Sport hunting was allowed until 1937 when all hunting activities were stopped. The park was gazetted in 1951 and now covers 5,700 square miles (14,763 square km) of some of the best grassland range in Africa, as well as extensive acacia woodland savanna. There is a permanent corridor between Masai Mara national reserve in Kenya and Serengeti allowing wildebeests to migrate from the Serengeti plains in the south to the Loita Plains in the north. The park is Tanzania’s oldest park and a Unesco World Heritage Site.
WEATHER AND CLIMATE IN SERENGETI NATIONAL PARK
The dry season is from June to October. During this time, afternoon temperatures are usually around 25°C/77°F. Most days have a clear sky. It gets cold at night with minimum temperatures around 14°C/57°F. There are two wet seasons. The short rain’ are from November to December and are unpredictable but will they will be unlikely interfere with your safari. The long rains are from March to May. During the Wet season, it rarely rains all day, but afternoon thundershowers can be likely. They are the wettest months.
WILDLIFE IN SERENGETI
The Serengeti national park offers some of the best wildlife viewing in Africa. It is best known for its huge herds of plains animals (especially wildebeests, gazelles, and zebras), and one of the few place in Africa where vast land-animal migrations still take place.
It is also forms a Lion Conservation Unit together with Maasai Mara National Reserve. More than 3,000 lions live in this ecosystem. Leopard population is good but very few number of black rhino due to poaching. Mammal carnivores include the cheetah, spotted hyena, jackals, African golden wolf, honey badger, striped hyena, caracal, mongooses, and otters.
Primates such as yellow and olive baboons, patas monkeys, and vervet monkey, black-and-white colobus are also seen in the forests of the Grumeti River. African bush elephant herds have recovered from low numbers in the 1980s caused by poaching.
Reptiles include Nile crocodile, leopard tortoise, rainbow agama, Nile monitor, chameleon, African python, black mamba, black-necked spitting cobra, and puff adder among others.
There are over 500 species of birds that are perennially or seasonally present in the Park, of which five species are endemic to Tanzania. They include Masai ostrich, vultures, secretary bird, kori bustards, helmeted guineafowls, Grey-breasted spurfowl, blacksmith lapwing, african collared dove, red-billed buffalo weaver, southern ground hornbill, crowned cranes, sacred ibis, cattle egrets, black herons, knob-billed ducks, saddle-billed storks, white stork, goliath herons, marabou storks, yellow-billed stork, spotted thick-knees, lesser flamingo, shoebills among many others.