Qualla: Kasanka National Park

Kasanka National Park: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mehmet Karatay, CC BY-SA 4.0. Every November, the sky above one small patch of Zambian swamp forest turns black. Ten million straw-coloured fruit bats, drawn from as far away as the Congo, converge on a thicket along the Musola stream barely a few kilometers wide. They come for the masuku berries and waterberries ripening with the first rains. They eat 330,000 tonnes of fruit in three months and then disappear. Kasanka National Park, covering roughly 390 square kilometers in Zambia's Central Province, would be worth visiting for its miombo woodlands, its sable antelope and sitatunga, its 471 recorded bird species. But it is the bats that have made it famous, and the bats that make it strange.

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Image: Mehmet Karatay | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kasanka National Park: The Bat Forest

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sybryn, CC BY-SA 4.0. The phenomenon centers on one of the last intact tracts of Mushitu forest in the country, a swamp-evergreen woodland of red mahogany, waterberry, and quinine trees. The first arrivals appear in mid-October. By mid-November the roost has thickened to its full density, estimated at...

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Image: Sybryn | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kasanka National Park: A Park Saved by Gunshots

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mr. Chishinzhi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Kasanka's survival depends on one very unusual origin story. In 1985 a retired British colonial officer named David Lloyd visited the park, which by then was a neglected shell: no staff, no infrastructure, no budget, and plenty of poachers. Lloyd heard gunfire from inside the res...

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Image: Mr. Chishinzhi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kasanka National Park: Water, Woodland, Fire

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sybryn, CC BY-SA 4.0. Away from the bat roost, Kasanka is a mosaic of habitats shaped by water and fire. Miombo woodland covers seventy percent of the park, broken by grassy drainage channels called dambos that retain moisture deep into the dry season. Nine permanent lakes and five perennial rivers st...

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Image: Sybryn | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kasanka National Park: Birds, Antelope, and Quiet Predators

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fritz Geller-Grimm, CC BY-SA 2.5. Kasanka is also, by the reckoning of leading ornithologist Ian Sinclair, home to some of the finest birding in Africa. Over 470 species have been recorded in a park small enough to drive across in an afternoon. A boat along the Luwombwa might turn up Pel's fishing owl, African fi...

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Image: Fritz Geller-Grimm | CC BY-SA 2.5