The world famous Africa savanna reserve Akagera National Park offers amazing wildlife experience that ranks best in Africa in its savanna plains, rolling highlands, papyrus swamps and forest lakes. Truly the top Rwanda national park for game viewing is a home to impressive number of exceptional wildlife both in possession and reintroduced. Many animal species have been reintroduced in the park in the past years including the Masai giraffe, Lions “the Queen of the Jungle’, and black Rhinos which were first reintroduced in Rwanda in 1950s with five black rhino females and two males from Tanzania.
After a period of 20 years the population went high beyond 50 black rhinos but sadly all the animals perished in the next 10 year due to high poaching. For a while everyone thought the park rhino species had ceased until 2007 when one was spotted around the park. This made the park management think of a second black rhino reintroduction in 2016. Now that the western boundary fence is complete the lions deal, black rhinos are the next agenda .The Rwanda development Board together with the government of Netherlands finalized a conservation deal which will see the success of black Rhinoreintroduction in Rwanda.
Akagera National Pak being managed by African parks, a South Africa non-profit organization which takes total responsibility for rehabilitation and long-term management of national parks in partnership with governments and local communities, will implement all its rehabilitation programs hence becoming one of the best wildlife viewing grounds in East Africa. The Rwanda Embassy at The Hague confirmed that the project was presented Thursday morning on the World Wildlife Day at the Save Wildlife Conference which took place in the Netherlands.
“The development represents a very prestigious and positive initiative to bring an endangered species back into a safe environment in Rwanda,” said the source, adding that these efforts will ensure the restoration of the Akagera National Park as a ‘Big Five’ park and will boost tourism in Rwanda. The amazing news for Rhino reintroduction came just after the replacing of the missing lions at the park last year when seven Lions were brought in from South Africa as a way of promoting Rwanda wildlife travel across the globe. Despite Rwanda bordering with Tanzania a country of plentiful wildlife, wildlife had failed to migrate forcing Rwanda to instead use reintroduction method instead of waiting for natural possession.
Other reintroduced animal species at the park are the current elephant population which once also ever existed in the park though disappeared mysteriously in 1951. Years later the park management had to bring back the elephants carrying a good number from Bugesera South of Kigali which is now a human settlement ground. As it’s not easy to transfer elephants from one place to the other, only juvenile elephants where relocated leaving the adults being killed. However fear for adult’s elephants to harm humans in Bugesera the only option was to get rid of them. Out of the 26 young elephants, the three youngest needed a lot of care and the most young one “Mutware’ adapted with humans around the park making it a star elephant in all the surrounding communities.
Today the number of elephants in the park has gone high to 90 individuals a good number for game viewing tourists. Therefore wildlife tourists to the park can view a wide number of wildlife including Sitatunga,water bucks, Zebras, antelopes, birds, primates-the velvet monkeys, blue monkeys, bush babies etc. Besides predators in the park include leopards, hyena and lions .Be ready for massive wildlife viewing in Akagera soon and get nice photo shoots of Rwanda Big five.