Ngorongoro Things to Do

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As with other places like the Serengeti and Maasai Mara, the Ngorongoro Crater has quite a few lions. During the daylight hours they are either hunting, eating or sleeping and can normally be found quietly hiding in the long grass that cover a lot of the Crater's floor.

The highlight for us was seeing the endangered black Rhino. They were quite far off but we had a pretty good look with binoculars. They are the reason many come to the crater. At the beginning of the 20th century their numbers in Africa were estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. The Black Rhinoceros has been pushed to the brink of extinction by illegal poaching for their horn and by loss of habitat. The horn is used in tradional Chinese medicine and is said by herbalists to be able to revive comatose patients, cure fevers, and aid male sexual stamina and fertility. The purported effectiveness of the use of rhino horn in treating any illness has not been confirmed by medical science. In the Ngorongora Crater they are said to number not more than 20 and park rangers heavily guard them.

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We then drove for quite a while without seeing much of anything. This surprised us as we wrongly assumed animals would always be here in large numbers, but the crater is huge and during the time of drought the animals rest out of the hot sun. When we reach a jungle area we spot a spectacular Ayres Hawk Eagle. He’s perched on a small branch above a stream, an ideal location for fishing. We also see many Grey Crowned Crane. They are quite comical looking with bright blue eyes and fuzzy heads.

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As soon as we arrive in the crater we see our very first wildebeest. We took numerous pictures ,only to see huge herds a short while later. Also there were herds of zebra. We took quite a while trying to catch them in just the right position. Their stripes fascinate me. So exotic.

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On our way to the crater we see some Maasai taking their cattle down the narrow and very steep descent, in search of water. Once again their tough hard life astounds us and we silently count the blessings of our easy life.
Each vehicle is permitted a maximum of 6 hours in the crater. This is in an attempt to control the safari traffic, which would be otherwise out of control especially during peak times. As it is when we visit ,traffic is light and we only see between 6 or 8 vehicles at any one time.

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Flamingos are very common on the large lake in the centre of the crater, Lake Magadi, because of its saline nature. Flamingos are filter feeders and feed on plankton, which is plentiful in such lakes. The lake also attracts many other water birds including storks, avocets, plovers and black-winged stilts – we saw sacred ibis and marabou stork, but these were too far off for us to capture them on film.

Elsewhere on the grasslands we saw ostrich, crested cranes, bustard and black kites. Some of these were also hard to get good photos of, but ostriches are big enough to get decent shots of course (see photo 2), and the lovely crested cranes (photo 3) allowed us to get very close.

Make sure you tell your guide if you’re keen on bird-watching as they have a tendency to focus on making sure you see the larger animals and especially the Big Five (lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and rhinoceros). And although we’re not big bird watchers, we were still very pleased to have seen these as they’re very much part of the African landscape.

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As well as the big cats, we saw plenty of other animals during our drive in the crater: zebra, wildebeest, gazelles, hippos and rhino. It’s so hard to pick out a favourite! I have a fondness for zebras (perhaps it’s the black and white stripes – they look like a herd of Newcastle United fans LOL), but I was also drawn to the shaggy ungainliness of the wildebeest. And while the gazelles were elegant in their movements, the cumbersome hippos made a good contrast – I loved the way they looked almost like living stepping-stones as they wallowed sleepily in this pool (photo 2), though I suspect that if we’d try to walk on them they would soon have woken up!

But perhaps the most exciting sighting, after the big cats, was this black rhino. She had a baby with her, and was very anxious and protective, so we couldn’t get too close – thank goodness for zoom lenses and binoculars! Wikipedia tells me that only about 14 rhinos were living in the area in the mid 1990s (we were there in 1999) so I think we were incredibly lucky to get this sighting.

Wikipedia also gives estimated numbers for the other animals, which are much more numerous: wildebeest (7,000 estimated in 1994), zebra (4,000), and Grant's and Thomson's gazelles (3,000). Some animals however are not to be found in the crater – giraffe, elephants (apart from a few bulls) and impala. All of these prefer foods that don’t grow here, like thorn trees, so they stay on the rim and in the surrounding forests

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The most exciting wildlife encounters for us in the Ngorongoro Crater were with big cats. The first of these was when we came across a pride of five dozing under a tree near the small river that runs through the crater. They had almost certainly just eaten and were sleeping it off. This meant that Reginald was able to get our vehicle very close to them. We watched them for quite a while, hoping they might wake up (although if they had they may have resented our presence). We were able to take some reasonable photos too, though the dappled shade meant that these weren’t quite as clear as we’d have liked.

Later on the same day Reginald spotted a cheetah family, parents and three cubs. These were at some distance from us, but near enough for us to be able to watch them through binoculars and observe the parents fussing over the youngsters. And our 200 mm zoom lenses were just about adequate to capture them on film.

The closed-in nature of the crater makes such encounters more likely. However, it also means that the lions of Ngorongoro have a problem. Because the crater offers such an abundance of game for them to hunt, they tend to remain here rather than roaming the plains as most of their species does. In the 1980s scientists studied all the lions there and compiled their “family trees”. They concluded that all of them were descended from just 15 individuals who had survived when a plague of biting flies had devastated most of the prides in the crater in the early 1960s. This shared ancestry means that inbreeding must be common, leading to a reduction in reproductive rates. It is possible that the Ngorongoro lions could die out, even though they are protected from hunting and shielded by the park’s status as a World Heritage Site from many of the ills that befall their cousins who roam more freely.