Botswana is a good-sized country in central southern Africa. Botswana is landlocked and sparsely populated with only about two million people. Some 45% of the country is either national parks or land preserves. Botswana is mostly flat with about 70% being part of the Kalahari Desert. The Kalahari is a semi-arid sandy savanna with very fine sand. Rain in the Kalahari varies from a few inches a year to twenty inches of rain a year and as a result of that, the vegetation varies as well. Some areas have very heavy growth while other areas do not. But either way, the Kalahari has a lot of vegetation for a desert.

Chobe National Park was Botswana’s first national park and it’s the second largest national park in Botswana. Chobe is in the northern part of Botswana and the Chobe River forms the park’s northern border. The area of Chobe national park is very near the borders with Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Southern Africa is reported to have some of the largest animal populations in Africa. I don’t doubt that, but I would add that while the animal populations might be bigger than other areas of Africa, they might also be harder to see. We traveled to eastern Africa some years back and saw huge animal groupings. In eastern Africa, such as the Serengeti, the plains are open so the animals are easy to see. But much of southern Africa is woodland and areas of dense vegetation. That makes it harder to see the extent of a large herd of animals.

We saw the largest animal groupings on our trip in Chobe National Park. These photos are some of the larger groups of animals that we saw, at least that we know we saw. The first four photos were taken in relatively open areas. There were about fifty to sixty elephants in the parade that you see in the first photo. I had to stay zoomed back to get in as many as I did as they were spread out quite a bit. But this was a large herd of elephants.

The zebra dazzle that you see also had about fifty to sixty in it, possibly a few more. They aren’t all in the photo.

The rank of impalas here had about forty impalas, but we saw other ranks of impalas that numbered over one hundred. You can also see some baboons in the photo.

We counted eighteen hippos in this pod. That was the biggest pod of hippos close together that we saw, though we saw many more hippos in the Okavango Delta.

The last photo shows you why I stated earlier about large animal groupings “that we know we saw”. Often times, we could see some and see that there were many more in the bush, but couldn’t tell how many more. The tower of giraffes feeding here had many more but we could never see more than about a dozen at once, for obvious reasons.