Chizarira National Park

Chizarira: the rhino's last Eden and the long way back

In September 1988 a small group of Americans and Canadians followed a professional guide on foot through Chizarira after a pair of black rhino. They found them, within about 15 metres. One caught their scent and came at them, and the guide turned the charge by running straight at it, waving his arms and shouting. Their tour leader, D. Buitron, wrote it up the following year for Swara magazine under the headline “Chizarira: the black rhino’s last Eden”. He reckoned 300 to 400 rhino lived in the park and the Chete and Chirisa safari areas next door, about 5,000 km² between them, and that apart from two incidents in Chete the poachers had not yet touched them.

Six years later there were none.

Three hundred rhino, then none

Many of those rhino were not native to the hills. When Kariba filled, Operation Noah carried animals off the drowning valley floor, and a good number of the black rhino it moved ended up here. Buitron’s article was already nervous. Gangs were crossing from Zambia, and Zimbabwe had launched Operation Stronghold in 1985 to stop them. By March 1988 at least 403 rhino were known to have been killed. He noted that poachers carried muti they believed made them bulletproof, and that the poaching was shifting west, with the latest incidents in Chete, right below Chizarira.

It arrived. The rhino were shot through the late 1980s and early 1990s, the few survivors were moved out to intensive protection zones such as Matusadona, and Born Free puts the date the last one was gone at 1994. BirdLife Zimbabwe still mentions black rhino in its account of the park, as a species it was once known for and has lost to poaching and translocation.

From 3,600 elephants to a list of carcasses

Elephants were the opposite problem for a while. The Zimbabwe Field Guide makes the point that Chirisa, next door, is where the country’s long argument about culling really got going: when Kariba filled and tsetse fences went up to the south, the herds were squeezed into less ground and the woodland took a hammering. A count for 1997 recorded on the African Elephant Database came to 3,626.

By 2016 there were about 750. Over 400 carcasses were found inside the park, Chizarira had become the centre of elephant poaching in northern Zimbabwe, and it was at risk of being degazetted. ALERT, which signed an agreement with ZimParks in January 2017 to study lions and elephants, says nobody had done in-depth research here for more than thirty years.

The damage was still walking about when Johann Groenewald visited for Tracks4Africa in 2018. He found a cow with a leg and shoulder so swollen she could not put weight on it. She was later put down, and found to carry five bullet holes, most likely from a failed poaching attempt. He saw elephant spoor everywhere and very few elephant. A reader of his post who had come in 1991 and 1992 remembered elephant and lions near the camps at night and plenty of buffalo; when he went back in 2011 he saw few animals and found the road to Busi washed away.

Rangers paid in Sables

National Park Rescue, an NGO that works on neglected parks close to collapse, took on the job and calls it Operation CK. Some of what it changed is unusual. Since 2008 Zimbabwe had let rangers shoot their own rations, which in Chizarira meant six buffalo, five elephant and five kudu a year. NPR started buying beef and vegetables from the villages around the park instead, twelve cows from April 2019 onwards. Rangers who do good work earn Sables, a points currency that buys equipment, food or building materials and is worth double if spent on training or education. Opening and grading over 200 km of roads turned up a lot of illegal activity in corners nobody had patrolled for years.

In 2024 Defend, the organisation run by Dr Niall McCann, signed a 20-year agreement with ZimParks for the park. The Herald reported that year that 39 community scouts, trained and equipped with EU money, patrol alongside the rangers, and by 2025 the signs of elephant poaching were reported down by more than 90 per cent.

A lion that walked to Hwange

Between 2017 and 2019 four lions were collared for the Chizarira/ALERT Lion Project. One of them, a young male listed as SAT2168, seems to have left the park in the rains and travelled through a string of settlements towards Hwange. His wet-season range ran to over 700 km². That is not as romantic as it sounds. About 90 per cent of the park is surrounded by communal land, lions get caught in snares as by-catch while chasing buffalo and kudu, and four mobile cattle bomas and the new Mucheni Conservancy are part of the effort to keep cattle and lions apart.

Visitors who come now describe a park that sounds alive more than it looks it. Groenewald heard lions roaring and hyenas calling at night. A family who camped three nights at Mucheni Gorge in 2022 saw one lion and had a genet in camp, and what stayed with them was the ground hornbills calling in the dark. They called it a wilderness of vistas and bushveld, not a game viewer’s destination, and Shelley Cox of Africa Conservation Travel told The Herald in 2024 that the park had never been about big herds. The gorges help. BirdLife Zimbabwe puts them at up to 460 m deep, hot enough in summer to touch 40°C and cold enough in winter for frost in the valley bottoms.

Tundazi, the mountain at the north-eastern end of the park, is said in local legend to be home to an immense serpent, the river god Nyaminyami. After what the rhino and the elephants went through, nobody here could blame him for keeping out of sight.