Lake Mburo National Park is located conveniently close to the highway that connects Kampala to the parks of western Uganda. It is the smallest of Uganda’s savannah national parks and underlain by ancient Precambrian metamorphic rocks which date back more than 500 million years. Patches of papyrus swamp and narrow bands of lush riparian woodland line many lakes. The parks’ precarious past has seen wildlife virtually eliminated several times: firstly in various attempts to rid the region of tsetse flies, then to make way for ranches and finally as a result of subsistence poaching. The park is now home to 350 bird species as well as zebra, impala, eland, buffalo, oribi, Defassa waterbuck, leopard, hippo, hyena, topi and reedbuck. The wetland habitats comprise 20% of the park’s surface. Standing at an altitude 1,220m to 1,828m above sea level, Lake Mburo forms part of a 50km-long wetland system linked by a swamp together with 13 other lakes in the area. Five of these lakes lie within the park’s borders. The park contains much woodland as there are no elephants to tame the vegetation.