Samburu National Reserve

Overview

Samburu National Reserve, with its neighbours Buffalo Springs and Shaba, protects a strip of hot, semi-desert country either side of the Ewaso Ng'iro river in northern Kenya. The river is everything: a green corridor of doum palms and acacia through red rock and thorn scrub, and the only permanent water for a long way. What makes Samburu distinctive is the wildlife found here and almost nowhere further south - the reticulated giraffe, Grevy's zebra, Beisa oryx, gerenuk and Somali ostrich, collectively known as the Samburu Special Five. Elephant families use the river daily, leopard are unusually visible along the banks, and the reserve has a long history of habituated lion prides. It is also Samburu land, and cultural visits here are less staged than in many places. Kamunyak, the lioness that repeatedly adopted oryx calves in the early 2000s, was a Samburu animal.