Tarangire National Park

Tarangire National Park is beyond the African safari clichés. Spread wide with acacia and baobab trees, it is the sixth largest national park of Tanzania and widely renowned for African elephants. The park is named after Tarangire River that runs through separating it. Hence, the Park extends into two game controlled areas and the wildlife is allowed to move freely throughout.

Before the rains, droves of gazelles, wildebeests, zebras, and giraffes migrate to Tarangire National Park’s scrub plains where the last grazing land still remains. Tarangire offers an unparalleled game viewing, and during the dry season elephants abound. The park is also an exceptional shelter for endangered animals like, the fringe-eared oryx with its graceful horns, the towering greater kudu, and the tiny Ashy Starling. Tarangire homes both big cats and small like African lion, leopard, cheetah, caracal, honey badger, and African wild dog.

Herds of up to 300 elephants scratch the dry river bed for underground streams, while migratory wildebeest, zebra, buffalo, impala, gazelle, hartebeest and eland crowd the shrinking lagoons. It’s the greatest concentration of wildlife outside the Serengeti ecosystem – a smorgasbord for predators – and the one place in Tanzania where dry-country antelope such as the stately fringe-eared oryx and peculiar long-necked gerenuk are regularly observed.

Tarangire supports 500 species of birds making it a bird watcher paradise. A large no. of hoopoes, brown parrots and the white-bellied go away bird plus game birds such as the helmeted guinea fowl, yellow necked spurfow, and the crested francolin are seen at home here. Few other names that take shelter that include yellow-collared lovebirds, lilac breasted rollers, mouse birds, swifts, striped swallows, starlings, bee-eaters, hammer kops, plovers, Kori bustards, bateleur eagles, steppe eagles, the gigantic lappet-faced vulture and small parties of ground hornbills blustering like turkeys.

More ardent bird-lovers might keep an eye open for screeching flocks of the dazzlingly colorful yellow-collared lovebird, and the somewhat drabber rufous-tailed weaver and ashy starling – all endemic to the dry savannah of north-central Tanzania.

Disused termite mounds are often frequented by colonies of the endearing dwarf mongoose, and pairs of red-and-yellow barbet, which draw attention to themselves by their loud, clockwork-like duetting.

Tarangire’s pythons climb trees, as do its lions and leopards, lounging in the branches where the fruit of the sausage tree disguises the twitch of a tail.