Primate Safaris
Contact us
T : +256 392 159 498
T : +9 1 9544 666 665
E : info@primatesafaris.com
Primate Safaris
Contact us
T : +256 392 159 498
T : +9 1 9544 666 665
E : info@primatesafaris.com
National Park
Aberdare National Park.
About the Park
Aberdare National Park is Kenya's well-kept highland secret, a place that does not play by the rules of the typical East African safari. There is no open savanna here. No flat horizon. No golden grass catching the afternoon light. Instead altitude. Mist. Dense montane rainforest rising to nearly 4,000 meters above sea level, bamboo thickets so tall they form their own dark world, and open moorlands swept by highland winds where the sky feels enormous and close at the same time. This UNESCO-recognized park forms part of Kenya's Central Highlands Forest Complex, one of Kenya's five key water towers, feeding the Tana, Athi, and Ewaso Nyiro rivers, supplying water and hydroelectric power to millions of people downstream, including Nairobi. To protect Aberdare is not just to protect wildlife. It is to protect the water supply of an entire nation.
But the wildlife needs no justification beyond itself. Aberdare holds the second largest population of black rhinos in Kenya, a conservation achievement of enormous significance in a continent where rhino numbers have been devastated by poaching. Elephants move through the forest in quiet, deliberate herds. Leopards, both spotted and the legendary black morph, haunt the riverine forest. Lions make occasional appearances from the moorland. Buffalo graze the highland glades. All five of the Big Five are present in a setting utterly unlike anywhere else in Kenya.
And then there is the bongo. Kenya's rarest antelope, chestnut-coated with white stripes, moving ghost-like through dense forest undergrowth, finds its last natural stronghold here in the Aberdares. To see one in the wild is a sighting that veteran safari guides speak of in hushed, reverent tones. The bongo does not perform. It does not present itself conveniently on an open plain. It reveals itself briefly, quietly, and entirely on its own terms to those patient enough to wait for it.
Aberdare is also where Kenya invented the concept of the tree hotel and where those hotels still deliver their original promise with undiminished magic. At Treetops and The Ark, guests gather at floodlit waterholes after dark to watch elephants, rhinos, buffalo, and forest hog emerge from the trees one by one, drinking and grazing in the quiet of the highland night. It was at Treetops in 1952 that Princess Elizabeth went to bed as a princess and woke as Queen of England, a detail that the lodge mentions with the casual pride of somewhere that knows its own history.
Over 290 bird species fill the park's altitude zones, including the Aberdare cisticola, found only here, and the crowned eagle, a forest predator powerful enough to take small primates from the canopy. Hartlaub's turaco, the bar-tailed trogon, and Jackson's francolin. The birding here is highland, specialized, and extraordinary in its own quiet way.
Aberdare does not shout. It whispers. And those who lean in to listen find a Kenya that the open-plains safari crowd almost entirely misses: ancient, layered, and full of rare and beautiful things moving through the mist.
Wildlife
- Lion
- Leopard
- Elephant
- Rhinoceros
- Cape Buffalo
- Hyena
- Warthog
- Vulture
- Hornbill
- Crowned Crane
- Eland
- Waterbuck
- Bushbuck
- Baboon
- Colobus Monkey
- Serval
- African Civet
- Genet
- Porcupine
- Mamba
- Bongo
- Bushpig
- Kingfisher
- Weaver Bird