Botswana Travel Guide
Botswana Travel Guide
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Okavango Private Reserves
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Vumbura & Duba
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Flora and fauna highlights
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Mammals

Botswana Travel Guide

Mammals



When last visited, I was very impressed by the varied line up of antelope that I saw in the Vumbura Reserve in a few days. Unlike many of the areas further from the heart of the Delta, there wasn’t just a high density of one or two species, to the virtual exclusion of the rest.
Species that you can expect to see here include tsessebe, impala, lechwe, kudu, zebra, wildebeest, giraffe, warthog and steenbok. Sable are seen fairly often, especially near the airstrip. Waterbuck are common here; Vumbura is one of the few places within northern Botswana where you’ll find good numbers of them. Duiker, reedbuck and bushbuck are seen infrequently, whilst roan antelope are rare here, though have been seen occasionally in the late dry season. I know of one sighting of sitatunga in Vumbura (which was one February).
Wild dogs had denned here for several years running prior to my visit, and I was lucky enough to be able to watch a beautiful pack with pups at its den, situated in the mopane woodlands on the east side of the Vumbura. However, in a thick band of mopane woodlands it wasn’t possible to follow them when they moved off.
Cheetah are also resident, though, like the rest of the smaller game, they will move through the buffalo fence and out into the huge NG12, to the north. In the dry season, when many of the open floodplains are dry, it’s a classic open environment that is perfect for cheetah, rather like Mombo and parts of Selinda, so it’s a particularly good area in which to seek them.
Leopard are occasionally seen on night drives. Lion and spotted hyena are both relatively common. Both black-backed and side-striped jackals occur here, though the black-backed are seen much more regularly.
Moving westwards, Duba Plains is noted not only for its huge open plains, but also for having some of the best concentrations of buffalo in Botswana. Particularly large herds are found here during the dry season. These can easily number over a thousand animals, and inevitably they attract a very high concentration of lion – which in the Duba Plains area, is very much the dominant predator. The converse of this is that Duba doesn’t have the same balance of species, or the diversity, that you’ll usually find in Vumbura, giraffe, zebra and impala being the notable absentees, though Duba is curiously popular with warthogs!
Spotted hyena are flourishing here, despite the sizeable prides of lions, and side-striped jackals are seen fairly frequently whilst black-backed are largely absent.


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