Wildlife

Bushveld Adventures

The African bush is unique. There is no better place for big game, and South Africa's national and private game reserves all offer excellent wildlife and bird watching opportunities.

Visit the lowveld of Limpopo, Mpumulanga, the North West or KwaZulu-Natal for a typical safari experience. Here you can experince the Big 5 - lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and rhinoceros. The Kruger National Park alone boasts well over 10 000 elephants and 20 000 buffaloes.

In the Western Cape, with its different climate and vegetation, you won't find elephant or lion, but you will see springbok, Cape mountain zebra, bontebok, black wildebeest and many others.

In Gauteng province, little more than an hour's drive from the urban jungles of Johannesburg and Pretoria, you can see lion, elephant, buffalo and hundreds more species in their natural environments.

The Eastern Cape is fast becoming a favourite safari destination, not least because of its malaria-free status. The Addo Elephant National Park is constantly being enlarged and will extend over a huge range of biomes, from marine to mountain.

Golden Gate National Park in Free State province is well known for high altitude game such as eland and black wildebeest.

The Northern Cape, although a very arid region, still has some wonderful game destinations. Augrabies Falls National Park is mostly scenic, but does have some excellent animal and bird life. The Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, Africa's first cross-border park, is famed for its huge, black-maned Kalahari lions and for the elegant gemsbok, or oryx.

Biodiversity

South Africa has the third-highest level of biodiversity in the world, boasting seven major terrestrial habitat types, or ecological life zones, with distinct environmental conditions and related sets of plant and animal life.

Some 10% of the world's flowering species are found in South Africa, and it's the only country in the world that has an entire plant kingdom within its borders.

The Cape Floral Region, one of South Africa's eight World Heritage sites, comprises eight protected areas stretching from the Cape Peninsula to the Eastern Cape, cutting across spectacular mountain and ocean scenery and containing some of the richest plant biodiversity in the world.

The iSimangaliso Wetland Park, the first site in South Africa to be inscribed on the World Heritage List, is one of the jewels of SA's coastline, with a unique mosaic of ecosystems - swamps, lake systems, beaches, coral reefs, wetlands, woodlands, coastal forests and grasslands - supporting an astounding diversity of animal, bird and marine species.

In terms of birdlife, of the 850 or so species that have been recorded in South Africa, about 725 are resident or annual visitors, and about 50 of these are endemic or near-endemic. South Africa's birdlife ranges from the ostrich - farmed in the Oudtshoorn district of the Western Cape, but seen in the wild mostly in the north of the country - to the endangered Blue Crane.

ESSENTIAL LINKS:

Endangered Wildlife Trust

Wildlife Society