Where the Lions Climb

The fig tree stands alone in a sea of grass, and for a long moment it looks like nothing at all. Then the branch moves. A tail, thick and tufted, swings lazily into view, and the shape resolves: a lioness draped along a horizontal limb ten feet above the ground, forelegs dangling, chin resting on bark, entirely unbothered by the vehicle idling below. In the Ishasha sector of Queen Elizabeth National Park, this is the ordinary miracle. It is one of only a handful of places on earth where lions habitually climb trees, and the sight of them up there — languid, improbable, faintly ridiculous — has become the single most photographed image in Ugandan tourism.

But Ishasha is only one chapter of a park that reads more like an anthology. Queen Elizabeth sprawls across roughly 1,978 square kilometres of western Uganda, spilling over four districts — Kasese, Rubirizi, Rukungiri and Kanungu — and pressing its northern shoulder against the snowfields of the Rwenzori Mountains. Within a single day's driving you can cross open savannah, humid forest gorge, papyrus swamp, crater fields and two great lakes. Few African parks compress so much geological and ecological argument into so small a space.

The park was gazetted in 1952 as Kazinga National Park, formed by welding together the Lake George and Lake Edward game reserves. Two years later it was renamed to mark a visit by Queen Elizabeth II — a colonial christening that, as Ugandan conservation writers have noted with increasing frequency, sits uneasily on a landscape that people have inhabited and named for far longer. The debate over whether the park should carry a Ugandan name resurfaces periodically and has never quite been settled.

What the two lakes gave the park was its spine: the Kazinga Channel, a broad natural waterway running some 32 kilometres between Lake George and the much larger Lake Edward. The channel is the reason Queen Elizabeth works as a wildlife destination. Water in a dry landscape concentrates everything. On an afternoon boat cruise — two hours, typically around USD 30 per person — the banks deliver one of the highest densities of hippopotamus anywhere on the continent, estimated at roughly two thousand animals, alongside Nile crocodiles hauled out like driftwood, elephant families shouldering down to drink, and buffalo standing chest-deep in the shallows with cattle egrets riding their backs.

The birding is the quieter headline. Queen Elizabeth records well over six hundred species, a figure that makes it one of the richest single protected areas in Africa for birdlife and earns it Important Bird Area status from BirdLife International. Eleven kingfisher species work the channel. Black bee-eaters hawk from forest edges. African skimmers cut the water's surface with that trailing lower mandible, and in the swampier margins the patient are occasionally rewarded with a shoebill — that prehistoric-looking heron with the expression of a disappointed accountant. UNESCO recognised the whole mosaic as a Man and the Biosphere Reserve in 1979.

Then there are the craters. The park's western flank is punched through with explosion craters — the violent legacy of volcanism along the Albertine Rift — many now filled with water, some brilliantly saline. The Katwe craters are the most famous, and Lake Katwe has been mined for salt by hand for centuries. The Crater Drive above Kichwamba, a 27-kilometre track along the rim, offers what may be the finest single stretch of scenery in the park: green bowls dropping away on both sides, the Rwenzoris floating on the northern horizon when the cloud lifts, and, far below, the shimmer of Lake George.

Kyambura Gorge cuts a different kind of drama. A 100-metre-deep forested slash through the savannah, invisible until you are standing on its lip, the gorge shelters a small, isolated community of chimpanzees along with black-and-white colobus and red-tailed monkeys. Tracking them is a humid, scrambling, uncertain business — sightings are not guaranteed the way they are in Kibale — but the setting compensates. So does the sense of walking through a forest that exists only because a river carved a hiding place for it.

The most important thing a visitor to Queen Elizabeth should understand now is that the animal on the postcard is disappearing. Uganda's first comprehensive large-carnivore survey in nearly two decades, conducted across six protected areas using spatial capture-recapture methods, found that lion numbers in the Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area had fallen by more than forty per cent since the previous count in 2018. The survey put the figure at roughly 39 individual lions across some 2,400 square kilometres — a density that conservationists describe, without exaggeration, as precariously low. Leopards showed similar strain. Spotted hyenas, adaptable as ever, are doing rather better.

The drivers are not mysterious. Queen Elizabeth is a park with people living inside it — eleven enclave fishing villages and a dense ring of farming communities on its boundaries — and where livestock and lions overlap, retaliatory poisoning follows. Uganda Wildlife Authority confirmed four lions poisoned in the conservation area in December 2025, killings it attributed to communities protecting cattle. Snaring set for bushmeat takes more. The findings now underpin Uganda's Strategic Action Plan for Large Carnivore Conservation, which runs to 2033.

There is countervailing work. The Uganda Carnivore Program, based inside the park, has run human-carnivore conflict mitigation since 2015, using revenue from its experiential lion-tracking tourism to compensate herders for livestock losses — a direct financial argument for tolerance. Whether that argument scales fast enough is the open question hanging over Ishasha's fig trees.

Park entry for foreign non-residents runs at USD 40 for a 24-hour ticket; foreign residents pay USD 30 and East African Community citizens UGX 20,000. Tickets expire strictly at the 24-hour mark, and overstaying triggers a fresh day's charge — worth planning around if you intend an early-morning drive on your departure day. Children under five enter free, with reduced rates for those aged five to fifteen. UWA applies low-season discounts across April, May and November, which are also, not coincidentally, the greenest and least crowded months.

The park is roughly a six- to seven-hour drive west of Kampala via Mbarara, or a shorter run from Fort Portal to the north — a routing that pairs naturally with Kibale's chimpanzees. Kasese and Mweya both have airstrips served by scheduled light aircraft. Game viewing is at its best in the dry months of June to August and December to February, when animals concentrate at water and the tracks through Ishasha stay passable; the wet seasons deliver better birding, dramatic skies and lower prices in exchange for mud.

Accommodation spans the full range, from the long-established Mweya Safari Lodge on its peninsula above the channel down to community-run bandas and campsites in the enclave villages. The Kazinga Channel launch, the Ishasha game drive and the Kyambura chimpanzee trek form the classic three-day itinerary; add the Crater Drive and a lion-tracking session with the Carnivore Program if you have a fourth.