Liwonde NP, Malawi: A hidden gem

Cheetahs in Liwonde

This is a story about a national park that punches above its weight. So far it is a conservation success story and hopefully it will continue to be so. The park is Liwonde National Park, located in the East of Malawi, about 2 hours drive from Blantyre and about 3.5 hours from the capital Lilongwe.

Southern ground hornbill

Unfortunately Malawi does not have a good track record when it comes to poaching and conservation of their protected areas They hunted out most of the predators, poaching for ivory was rife with both rhinos and elephants extinct in some of the parks, there was widespread deforestation and tourists were just not interested in visiting.

Small elephant family at Kombe Island

Luckily, it seemed that the Malawi government recognised that they needed help and Majete Wildlife Reserve was the first park that the conservation NGO African Parks took over. An experiment to see if wildlife areas could be restored and contribute positively to the economy of the country? Probably, but it worked and today Majete is a thriving Big 5 park. 

Lion cub

With a model that seems to work, African Parks took over the management of Liwonde National Park in 2015 having suffered the same fate as Majete. Rampant poaching, thousands of snares and sky high human-wildlife conflicts had the park on the brink of collapse, so it is a testament to the hard work that African Parks and the Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) have done that the park is now thriving and well worth a visit in our opinion, having spent a bit of time there over the last few months so this is our experience with Liwonde...

Male cheetah

After almost 3 years living in Rwanda, we moved to Malawi and arrived in Blantyre mid-March after an unexpected 2 month detour in Uganda which worked out quite well as we got to see both the shoebill and the chimps. Unfortunately for us, the timing couldn’t have been much worse - the world was just starting to shut down thanks to Covid. 

White-backed vulture in flight

While Malawi implemented some restrictions, we didn’t experience a total lockdown, but the unintended consequence was that all our household goods - including our camping gear - got stuck in Rwanda and it took 5 months for the truck to finally arrive in Malawi. 

 

Elephant herd  with the Chinguni Hill backdrop

We were also without a car so eventually we ventured out into the new masked world and got ourselves a good old Southern African special - a Hilux double cab pickup - or a “bakkie” as we’d call it here and dubbed it Nyasa - in cheeky reference to what the Tanzanians call the disputed Lake Malawi.

Young cheetah looks on

A week after getting our goods and we were off on our first camping trip - to Majete, which will be the source of another post in the future after we’ve been there a few more times to get a real sense of the park. Because the following week we went to check out Liwonde and over the next 3 months, we have been back every weekend bar one because we didn’t have a valid driver’s licence (and there are just too many traffic cops on the roads to take a chance!)

Dragonfly

About the park 

Liwonde is a river park, with the massive Shire River the main feature. You can’t actually see much of the main river from the park, unless you do the boat ride, instead you see the shallower side channels which support the wildlife, so it works out pretty well.. 

Vultures at a kill

The park is small… like really small. It’s 548 km2, but if that doesn’t give you much perspective, basically it takes about an hour and a half to drive from the entrance gate in the South to the tip in the North - so really small ;) 

Buffalo

Having said that, we don’t actually spend too much time in the north, prefering to only go to about the halfway point, since we’re only staying for a one night weekend and we’ve found that the best game viewing is in the South anyway as it’s the most open compared to the more wooded northern section. 

  

Hippo

The network of roads is pretty limited too. There is a main N/S road - to the east it’s mopane woodland and to the west is the Shire River, with a few meandering loops that head down to the river, although those roads are all black cotton soil, so we’ll see how they are when the rains come! Also a couple of roads around the hills in the parks, which have been surprisingly productive. They could do with a few more tracks especially to areas the predators are known to hang out, but I’m sure that will come with time.

Lions at Chikalongwe Loop

From our experience, the most productive sections are in the South, with the Chikalongwe loop giving us our best sightings of most of the animals. It includes the floodplain that is a magnet for animals heading for the river in the dry season. 

Flora

Mopane woodland in the dry season

Mopane woodland, baobabs and palm trees dominate the landscape to the east, while open floodplains with termite hills dominate the west, so it gives quite a number of different photo opportunities. And luckily considering all the mopane trees, not too many tsetse flies - although we’re waiting to see if that changes with the rains ;)

Kombe Island

With the exception of Ruaha NP in Tanzania, it’s probably the place with the most baobab trees that we’ve seen, and definitely the most that have been destroyed by elephants - the amount of tusking that the elephants have done to so many of the trees is very noticeable and we’ve seen that some of the older trees have even been protected from the elephants with barb wire. 

The baobabs are taking strain

The first time we ever went to Liwonde the first elephant we saw there was tusking a baobab - the following weekend that same tree had been completely destroyed. It may have something to do with the amount of elephants in the park, which leads me to…

Elephants

Elephants in single file

From our trips around East and Southern Africa, the dry season in Liwonde is a surprisingly good place to see elephants. At one stage, they had too many it seems, but after a historic translocation of 350 elephants from Liwonde to Nkhotakota NP, have hopefully become more manageable. 

Elephant bull

But there are still plenty to see - in fact, if you are coming in from the Southern entrance, there is a high chance that you will see at least a few elephants within 2 minutes of driving in. And considering the history of the park, they are astonishingly calm which has surprised us; we like to think that they can feel the change from poaching to protection over the last few years.

Crossing the channel

Because elephants need to drink almost every day, they trek to the river to drink and if you hang around long enough on the floodplains you will catch family herds coming out of the woods and crossing the channel to get to browse in the marshes. 

Two males jostling at the river

Sometimes the smaller herds get together to do the walk to the river, leading to scenes of 40-50 elephants in one spot which is really special. We’ve been lucky to catch them crossing the channel away from us (just elephant bums!) and towards us, as well as one special, close experience. 

Heading towards us!

We’d stopped under a tree in the heat of the day when about 30 elephants emerged from the woods about 200m away. Instead of crossing the plain right there to the river as we’d seen them do before, the matriarch decided to lead the herd straight to us, before she made her way almost within touching distance just past us, leading an amazingly silent group of pachyderms young and old - it was awesome!

Hanging around the mopane woodland

Catching the elephants in the mopane woodland also offers a different perspective, especially during the dry as it offers lovely colours and hues of the fallen leaves creating an interesting backdrop to the grey of the main subject. The dry has offered great photo opportunities of elephants; let’s hope the rains bring the same.

Buffalo

Buffalo

There are good buffalo herds around - we’ve seen at least 2 strong herds in the South and the dagga boys hanging around the hills. We even saw an oddly coloured buffalo which we originally thought was a lost cow as he has a white band across the body - while we only saw him briefly at quite a distance, we will be looking out for him in the future.

Buffalo herd at the river

Sable

Sable male with oxpeckers

Amongst all the surprises of Liwonde, one of the biggest are the sightings of sable antelope. Through all our travels sable has remained almost as elusive as roan antelope (we finally found them in Akagera in Rwanda) with our only sightings of multiple sable being in Chobe NP, but not on the scale that we have seen in Liwonde. 

The different colours of sable antelope

Not only do you see the impressive dark males, but there are breeding herds - the main one that we see is about 60 or 70 strong. Again, the dry has offered a real advantage here - on most days at least part of the herd are heading to the river so as long as you wait patiently, you should get a good sighting of them. 

Posing

And we’ve found that there is a nice male herd of about a dozen that is resident on one of the hills so there’s always a chance to catch some good shots of these beautiful antelopes.

Sable among the mopane

Other game

Eland with youngsters

The frustratingly elusive and shy Eland antelope is plentiful in the park, but we haven’t seen them too often, but our best sighting was a herd of about 70, which is probably the biggest Eland herd we’ve seen, complete with babies and males. 

Eland herd

We had a nice sighting, but not great photos - trying to get close to them usually results in only photos of their bums as they run off! 

Waterbuck are plentiful

Waterbuck, waterbuck, waterbuck everywhere! Considering they’re an antelope that needs water and there’s a river it makes sense you’d see plenty. And they are all over the park, so if you’re looking for a waterbuck safari, you’d be very successful ;) 

"Floppy" the waterbuck

If you’re ever in the park, check out the riverside drive in the South - there is one female that stands out from the rest as she’s got floppy ears - it makes her instantly recognisable and the one we always look out for when we’re driving in that area.

So many impala!

As with waterbuck, there are big populations of impala. As the dry season was heading to an end, we could see that so many of the females were heavily pregnant and the week after the rains broke, we were lucky to see a live birth. 

All legs and ears!

Impalas give birth at midday in bushes to avoid the predators so the photos weren’t worth much, but it was fantastic to see a baby impala being brought into the world, although he definitely needed to grow into his ears and legs;)

Beautiful horns of a male kudu

After living in East Africa for the last decade where the kudu are scarce, it is nice to see these graceful antelopes again - especially the males with their impressive horns, and there is a healthy population of them around. 

Reedbuck getting away from us

Other antelope that you will catch with regularity are bushbuck dotted around, and we’ve seen only a few reedbuck that looked as startled as us to see each other ;) 

Our only sighting of hartebeest

Zebra and Hartebeest are in short supply - we’ve only seen 4 zebras, so we’re not sure what the actual population is, and we caught sight of a small herd of hartebeest in the woods that raced off as soon as they saw us. And don’t worry about looking for giraffes - there aren’t any. We’re not sure if that is due to poaching rather than habitat limitation but we suspect the former.

Grazing hippos

Hippos… it’s a river park - there are plenty ;) The best place to catch them are at Kombe Island where the road is closest to a channel of water where a pod usually hangs out. Otherwise they can be heard all along the river channels or seen out the water grazing on the marsh grasses.

The heron and the hippo

We have been assured that there are rhinos in the park - we just haven’t seen them ;) 17 black rhinos found themselves in their new home from South Africa in 2019, but they were released in the more wooded North of the park - an area that we don’t usually spend a lot of time in. We do believe there is at least one rhino in the south of the park but so far this loner has eluded us, so we keep making the rounds around the hills hoping to catch him. 

A couple of chilling bushpigs

A highlight though have been the bushpigs. These shy and nocturnal creatures are very seldom seen around, but they seem to be less shy in Liwonde as we’ve seen quite a few of them around in the park, including a very bold one in the campsite up North. I assume he’s got used to people - and their food - being around so I’d think he’d be quite a good bet if you’ve never seen a bushpig.

Baboons

Baboons can be sneaky...

Baboons of course are all around - as in the rest of Southern Africa these are the savannah baboons as opposed to their much handsomer Oliver baboon cousins in East Africa. While we don’t usually pay much attention to baboons, we did witness a live kill by one of them, which was a moment of madness in the heat of the day. 

Foraging warthog family

We were chilling under our favourite tree on Chikalongwe loop (the same one we’d been under when the herd of elephants had walked past) and nothing much was happening - the antelope had already been to the river to drink and moved back into the woods, so we were doing some birding. Then a couple of warthogs with their offspring started moving out of the woods. 

The piglets that got away - see the baboon behind the tree?

There were 4 relatively young piglets following the adults and they were snuffling around the bases of the trees looking for food when a baboon walked past, just one who ignored the pigs and went to sit nearby. Then the 2 adults and 2 of the youngsters walked off leaving 2 of the piglets behind to carry on foraging - big mistake! 

Gotcha!

The next moment squealing pierced the calmness as the baboon that had been ignored by everyone (including us) grabbed one of the piglets and made off with it. 

Running off with his prize

A flurry of activity with pigs running in all directions - the mother trying to chase the baboon and lots of squealing from both the grabbed pig and its siblings, but it was all for nothing - the baboon won out in the end and spent the next couple of hours eating his piglet prize while the rest of his troupe gazed on longingly waiting for scraps. Just shows that things can happen anywhere, anytime in the bush - you just got to be there and be patient ;)

Waiting for scraps

We were really pleasantly surprised by the variety of abundance of the wildlife that are resident in the park and combined with the landscape offers some really nice photo opportunities. But as usual for us the focus more often than not is the predators…

New lion blood in Liwonde

Up until 3 years ago there weren’t even any predators in the park - well, maybe a couple of very shy hyenas but lions and cheetahs had been poached to extinction. After taking over the management of the park, AfricanParks introduced cheetahs in 2017 and lions a year later to bolster the predator population to be at least a Big-4 park - we’re not sure whether there are leopards or not as no one talks about them. 

Lions

Streeeeetch....

There is something special about hearing a lion roaring in the middle of the night while camping and finally that sound is back in Liwonde, with the introduction of 10 lions in 2018. We will be the first to admit that we are lion obsessed and having lions in a park always gives us an extra bit of enthusiasm when getting out first thing in the morning to look for signs and tracks of the big cats. 

Nothing to see here... just rolling around like a housecat

The lion population is still small in Liwonde, and so far they have been unsuccessfully in raising any cubs that are old enough to survive, but there are promising signs. We were lucky enough to be the first (we assume) to see 2 cubs when we came across a young lioness moving her two 6-week old offspring from their hill den across the road to another site. 

One of the lion cubs

The other cub

In another stroke of luck we caught her the following day moving them back again, but this time unfortunately one of the males were following her with the kind of focus that only comes with murder on the mind. 

Lioness mother

Leading the kids off

 

Our understanding of the situation was that these were probably the cubs of the previous male that had subsequently been killed in a takeover and now the new coalition of 2 males were killing the cubs that could possibly not be theirs. 

We named him Sandy because of the light coloured mane

We assume the male was successful in finding the youngsters because a couple of weeks later we saw the female mom back with the pride sans cubs, so the wait for new lions continues. But in a silver lining, there has been plenty of mating so hopefully by the beginning of 2021 there will be an explosion of cubbie cuteness!

And Kutse - we named him after the game reserve in
Botswana that's known for its dark maned lions

The lions seem to have split into a pride of 5 females that occupy the main game area with two other females further north, while the remaining female we believe hangs out right in the south near the lodges (of course…) 

Lioness doing the flehmen response

After the takeover in which the original 2 males were chased off and then killed, there are now 2 males which patrol the whole area but can most often be seen in the South, especially around the Chimwala plain and Chikalongwe loop. 

Some female bonding

Our first few sightings of lions were underwhelming to say the least - with the pride females hanging out on the plain far from the road. It took about 3 visits to Liwonde before we finally found one of the males and had the lions close enough to the road to get some good shots.

Our first good sighting of a male lion next to the road

And after our lion cub encounter, we’ve had pretty good luck with the lions, especially 3 of the females that have given us some nice sightings and photo opportunities. Hopefully soon we will have a boosted population of lions in the coming year!

Just chilling

Cheetahs

Cheetah mother with 3 cubs

We had heard that cheetahs had been reintroduced to both Majete and Liwonde before we moved to Malawi so we were excited to catch them. Living in Rwanda, we hadn’t seen cheetahs in 3 years (Akagera doesn’t have any - although they do have the Big-5 :)) and even in Tanzania it was only really in the Serengeti that we would reliably see cheetahs. So we were looking forward to finally catching some sightings of these graceful cats - and this is where Liwonde has delivered way, way beyond our expectations!

Our first sighting of a cheetah in Liwonde

We should have known the cheetahs would be special when our first sighting of a predator was a cheetah with an impala kill within half an hour of our first ever visit! We had just driven in and were still working out where to go when right next to the road under a bush was the cheetah female with her kill. She spent about 40 minutes eating before moving off and into the woods while a flock of helmeted guineafowl mobbed her - quite the extraordinary introduction to Liwonde!

The cheetah known as CF2

From a founder population of 7, cheetah numbers are now estimated at around 25 - they have absolutely thrived in Liwonde producing plenty of cubs, which have been a highlight for us. Our best cheetah sightings have been on the floodplains in the South; I’m sure there are more further north although the habitat isn’t as conducive with all the mopane woodland. 

Cheetah siblings

A cheetah mom with 3 sub-adult cubs is probably our favourites - she has given us fantastic sightings and is pretty relaxed around the cars. Our first really good sighting of her and her cubs was almost missed. We’d stopped to talk to one of the game drive vehicles that were still operating during Covid when suddenly the guide exclaimed “Cheetah” and out of the wood sauntered the four of them. 

Play time!

We spent over an hour with them - first drinking from pools of water (which were unfortunately too far for us) before they headed back towards us and the cheetahs started chasing each other! That’s a pretty special experience, watching 3 cubs run after each other - you can just see them honing their skills for when they need to hunt.

Getting used to chilling on the road

Balancing act

More play time!

We caught them a few weeks later again - driving into the park at 6am and catching them within 5 minutes of the gate! Again, the cubs played with complete disregard to us before finally settling down under a tree as it began to heat up. And in all this time - probably over an hour that we spent with them we had the cheetahs all to ourselves.

Watching mom go to hunt

That was a week after a good sighting that we unfortunately missed - the same 4 at a kill. And we missed it because we’d found another cheetah family with a kill ;) This time it was a mother with 2 sub-adult cubs, whom we have seen a few times since then again. 

A bit more watchful than the 3 other subadults we'd seen

Spotted with a kill

We assume that the father(s) of all these cubs are a coalition of 3 males that we’ve only seen once. Amusingly one weekend we were heading back from Liwonde and trying to decide whether to go back to the park the following weekend or head to Majete instead. We’d actually decided to head to Majete, but later we checked Instagram and saw that someone (that we’d actually seen in the park) had posted photos of 3 cheetahs… 

The young cheetahs wisely decided
not to tangle with the warthog!

So when it was time to pack the car a week later and head out, our minds had been changed again to go back to Liwonde on the off chance that we could catch those cheetahs. It was a long shot but we had an idea where the photo had been taken so we headed straight there on Saturday morning. 

Spotted around Chinguni Hill one evening

Lo and behold, in the same area where the cheetahs had been sighted the previous week, but closer to the road under a tree sat the same 3 cheetahs! 

The coalition of 3 that we were lucky to catch

Yes, it was a chance in a million, but our hunch had paid off ;) We spent the rest of the morning with those three, until another car finally arrived and the cheetahs headed off into the woods. And many visits later, we have not seen the coalition again.

Other predators

Side striped jackals are found in Liwonde

We know there are at least 15 spotted hyenas in the park (that was in 2015 - we hope there are more than that now) although we have yet to catch a glimpse of one. We have heard them though at night in the campsite in the south, so we know they are around - we just need to find them.

Side stripe shows up clearly on this jackal

As mentioned, no one talks about leopard sightings. We assume there may be a few deep in the heart of the woods that we will never get to hear or see, but hopefully there is a plan to reintroduce leopards to the park one day soon as they did in Majete.

Birding

Collared palm-thrush, a common sighting in Liwonde

Liwonde has over 400 species of birds so it’s really a sight not to be missed if you are a birder. Being a river park, it has a great collection of water birds, along with the usual ones that you would expect in a protected area. 

The return of vultures to the park

One of the highlights in terms of birds is the return of the vultures. Before AfricanParks took over the vultures were completely missing from the park. But now you will see vultures every day catching the thermals high above while looking for predator kills. 

Vultures at a kill

Ruppell's griffon vulture

The white-backed vultures are the most common, but in amongst them you will catch the odd Lappet-faced or white-headed vulture and if you look carefully you’ll find the Ruppell’s griffon vulture - you may mistake it for a white-backed vulture, but the yellow beak is diagnostic.

Always lots of squabbling at a kill 

Little bee-eater with a bee

The migration season - between October and March - brings all the birds from around the world, but of course it will be raining! We haven’t done a boat trip yet, but plan to do it during the rainy season to catch the migrants on the water’s edge. 

Collared pratincole arriving for the summer

Another common migrant - the European bee-eater

But even during the dry, there are plenty of birds to keep you occupied, from the ubiquitous collared palm-thrush to the abundance of openbill storks to the beautifully coloured and probably most photographed bird in Africa - the lilac breasted roller ;)  The racket-tailed roller - the lilac's lesser seen cousin is also seen in the park, but we have yet to catch him...

Lilac breasted roller

African jacana can be seen all along the river

Overall impression of the park

Liwonde has blown our mind with the quality and quantity of wildlife for a park so small that was in dire straits only 5 years ago. We are aware that we have seen the park at its best - with hardly any crowds (Covid again) and in the dry season, so look forward to seeing it green, but overall it’s really been a little gem that has kept us going back.

Liwonde NP sunset