Lake Mburo National Park

Location

Last Visited: 2008 View Google Map, Geocoding, Google Earth pushpin, what3words, etc.

The first thing that strikes you about Lake Mburo National Park is how young all the trees are. Back in the 1950s, the British colonial authorities were determined to rid the area of tsetse fly. Their first plan was to kill all the animals in the area, and thus starve the flies to death. This turned into a disastrous and expensive blood-bath that failed to eliminate the tsetse as it proved impossible to kill all the smaller and more elusive animals.

Plan B was to eliminate all the trees and bushes around which the flies lived, and hundreds of square kilometres of bush were stripped, cut and burned, until barely any trees were left. Then came the rains — and a thick cover of scrub quickly grew up and provided enough cover for the flies.

The next year they implemented their third plan, which was to soak the entire area in insecticide. That got rid of the tsetse — as well as virtually every other insect species, and all the insectivorous birds and small mammals.

It is a tribute to nature's ability to recover that, despite its appalling treatment in the 50s and the subsequent unrest during the Obote and Amin years, Lake Mburo is now a prime wildlife reserve supporting Uganda's only population of impala (afterwhich its capital is named), and one of only three populations of Burchell's zebra.