Hwange National Park is a huge park at over 5,600 square miles or roughly the size of Belgium or Wales. It’s the largest park in Zimbabwe and includes desert sand areas, woodlands, grasslands, savannah, and granite outcroppings. It has some 108 mammals and over 400 species of birds. The park lies in the north western corner of Zimbabwe and borders Botswana. The park gets very little rain and in large part, the animals are supported by wells and pumps that keep year around water holes. The best time to see game is in the dry season, which is when we were there. That’s because during the dry season, the animals tend to congregate near the water holes and the trees and bushes have lost their leaves.

Hwange National Park is where Cecil the Lion lived for thirteen years before being killed by an American dentist. The safari guide that was killed by a lion three weeks before we arrived in southern Africa was also killed in Hwange National Park. The park has large numbers of elephants, zebra, giraffes, predators, and wild dogs. This was where we saw the wild dogs on a night game drive. These won’t be our best animal photos as most of the time, the animals were in the woodlands. But we still got to see plenty of the animals, so here we go.

There was a dozen or so Zebra in this dazzle but they were spread along in a row in this dense woodland. The animals tended to walk in lines due to the thick woodlands.

Warthogs were one animal that we saw often in Hwange and also one animal that we saw near the roads quite often, giving us some better photos.

You can find this Jackal right in the middle of the photo. It’s not a prize winning photo but this guy didn’t want to stick around and pose for me.

This lion wasn’t shy but rather was resting from having just killed a wildebeest, all by himself. He’s just to the right of the center of the photograph. The dead wildebeest is out of sight. We were not allowed to leave the road in the park, so we couldn’t get a better photo than this. You can only see his head as he is lying down and the rest of his body is behind the downed tree.

This Tawny Eagle was in Hwange but we saw these eagles in all four parks. Tawny eagles are residents here, mostly in open, wooded savannah areas. They are effective hunters but also effective thieves of animals caught by other birds.