Zambezi National Park

Angels, snares and the last lioness of Hippo Creek

On 13 November 1855 David Livingstone set off down the Zambezi from Sesheke by canoe, with Sekeletu’s uncle Moriantsane for company and the cattle driven along the bank. After a night at the Chobe confluence and another ten miles of river, the boatmen pulled in at an island called Nampene, at the head of the rapids, and from there the party walked. “The next evening we slept opposite the island of Chondo,” he wrote in Missionary Travels. They crossed a stream, reached Kalai the next morning, and only then got back in a canoe for the last stretch to the falls.

The angels were looking at the river

The most quoted line Livingstone ever wrote is usually hung on the falls. Read it in place and it is about the water upstream. Twenty minutes out from Kalai he could see the spray columns five or six miles off, and he spent a paragraph on the banks and islands instead: baobabs with arms like tree trunks, palms that always look “far from home” in a picture, trees spangled with blossom. That view, he said, had never been seen by European eyes, “but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight”. At that point in his account he had not yet reached the lip of the gorge. Wild Zambezi makes the same point about this park, and it is right. The river frontage you drive along today is the kind of country he was describing, waterberry trees leaning over the channel with kingfishers and fish eagles on the branches.

He also wanted mountains in the background. You will not get those here.

The last lioness of Hippo Creek

For years the Hippo Creek pride lived in the northern section of the park. Its recent story is a short list of things going wrong. A Cornell veterinary student working with the Victoria Falls Wildlife Trust wrote in January 2026 that the pride’s dominant male had been tracked down when his collar showed odd movements, and that a wire snare looped through his mouth was cut off in time. The pride’s old leading female was not so lucky. She was killed and left three cubs too small to fend for themselves. Her claws turned up when a tourist bought some from a local vendor and a bystander sent the buyer to the authorities. The trust matched them to her through its lion genetic database, and arrests followed.

By 2026 the pride was down to one adult female. Tour guides spotted her with a cable snare around her neck. A vet team darted her, took the wire off, treated the wound and fitted a satellite collar so they could watch her recover. Two days later the collar stopped moving. She had walked into a second snare and died. The search teams swept the area for two days afterwards and pulled out several more.

It is not only one pride. In March 2025 a collared lion near Victoria Falls was found with its head and claws gone after its signal went static, and in April 2026 the trust wrote of a recent poisoning that killed several lions and broke up a pride. The prides it follows in this landscape have names, among them Chamabonda, which shares its name with the vlei on the south side of the park.

Guides as the eyes in the bush

What changed most recently is who is watching. In 2025 the trust monitored eight prides, put out five new GPS collars and started flying a donated drone that finds lions faster and lets the team watch them from above without disturbing them. It also set up a sighting reporting system, and 18 tour guide companies now send in what they see on game drives, and it was tour guides who spotted the snared Hippo Creek lioness. There are other long projects in the park too. ALERT has studied its spotted hyenas since August 2015 and has been building a photo identification file of its giraffe since February 2017.

Charles Brightman, writing a park update for Victoria Falls Guide in June 2011, made an argument that still holds. A pride of six had just made a kill near Kandahar, and an elephant bull had been poached about 800 m inland of picnic site 16 the week before. His point was that the more visitors there are on the tracks, the harder it is for poachers to work unseen. Snaring was lower in 2025 than in earlier years, by the trust’s count, but elephants, buffalo, giraffe and zebra were all among the snared animals its teams dealt with.

A park with no fence

None of this stays inside a line on a map. The park is unfenced, and the animals move freely into the hunting areas to the west and south. Elephants cross the Zambezi into Zambia, and others walk on into Botswana. Some come the other way after dark, into Victoria Falls town, looking for gardens with ripe fruit on the trees. The warthogs that crop the lodge lawns in town are the tame end of the same open system.

There is no rhino here at all. What turns up instead, in season, is a colony of carmine bee-eaters, which is a fair swap on a hot afternoon.