Chobe National Park Elephants: Movement, Water and Conservation in Northern Botswana

In the late afternoon of a dry-season day on the Chobe River, the elephants come down to drink. They walk out of the woodland in long lines, family groups led by older females, calves hurrying to keep up, and spread along the bank to drink, bathe and sometimes swim across to the floodplain islands. On a good day you might see hundreds. The scene is one of the great wildlife spectacles of Africa, but it is not a fixed attraction. It is the result of a very particular pattern of water, season and movement, and of decisions taken by people across five countries. Chobe National Park elephants are a story about where water is, where elephants go to find it, and what happens to a landscape when they all arrive at once. On Days 14 to 16 of our Southern Africa Tour, the group stays on the Chobe River near Kasane.

Chobe National Park and its river

Chobe became a game reserve in 1960 and a national park later that decade. It covers about 11,700 square kilometres of northern Botswana, and it is not one landscape but several: the Chobe riverfront in the north-east, known as Serondela; the Savuti Marsh and the Linyanti Marsh further west; and a dry interior of grassland and woodland between them. The Chobe River runs along the park’s north-eastern edge and, for much of its length, forms Botswana’s border with Namibia. Just downstream of the park lies Kasane, the town that serves as its northern gateway.

It is the riverfront that most visitors see, and it is there, along a relatively short stretch of permanent water, that the elephants concentrate in the dry months.

How many elephants are there?

A great many, but the numbers need care. In 2022, an aerial survey across the Kavango–Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), which links Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola, estimated about 227,900 elephants across the region. About 131,900 of them, roughly 58 per cent, were in Botswana, by far the largest share of any of the five countries.

Figures for Chobe itself are less clear. Some sources give around 50,000 for the park, while others quote figures over 100,000, which appear to describe northern Botswana’s population as a whole rather than the park alone. The honest version is that the park sits at the heart of a range shared by around 130,000 elephants in northern Botswana, many of which come to the Chobe and Linyanti rivers in the dry season.

The trend is debated too. Botswana’s elephant estimates rose from under 10,000 in the early 1960s to about 50,000 by 1990 and around 130,000 by the 2010s, and have been broadly flat since; some commentators have questioned whether the more recent figures are as stable as they look. The 2022 survey also recorded carcasses equal to about 10 per cent of the live population, which its authors treated as a reason for caution. Of the carcasses judged to be fresh or recent, more were found in Botswana than in any other KAZA country, 962 in all, though a carcass count alone does not show how an animal died.

Water, seasons and movement

Elephants are tied to water. An adult can drink up to around 200 litres in a day, and in northern Botswana, where rain falls mainly between late October and April, water decides where they can live. In the wet season, rain fills countless shallow pans across the interior, and elephants spread out across a vast area to feed. As the dry season advances, from around May, the pans dry up one by one, and the herds move towards the permanent rivers: the Chobe, the Linyanti and the Kwando. By August and September, the late dry season, the Chobe riverfront is at its most crowded.

Some of these movements are long. A study of collared female elephants in neighbouring Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe found that most of them migrated seasonally, some between ranges up to 160 kilometres apart, and one travelled around 260 kilometres. Elephants also cross rivers between countries, but fences stop them. A 2022 study that tracked 105 collared elephants found that females never crossed border fences at all, and identified a 30-kilometre unfenced gap west of the Kwando River as the main route for elephants moving from northern Botswana into Namibia and Angola. Rivers, by contrast, slowed elephants down without stopping them: in the same study, females crossed a river on about one in ten of the occasions they reached one, and males slightly more often. Watching a herd swim the Chobe, you are seeing one of those crossings.

KAZA: conservation across borders

Because elephants do not recognise national boundaries, conservation here has had to cross them too. On 18 August 2011, Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe signed a treaty creating the Kavango–Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, covering around 520,000 square kilometres. KAZA links national parks, reserves and community lands across the five countries, with the aim of keeping wildlife corridors open, coordinating management and spreading the benefits of tourism. The conservation area was formally launched on 15 March 2012 at Katima Mulilo, in Namibia’s Zambezi Region, just across the river from Chobe. The 2022 elephant survey was itself a joint project, flown to a common standard across all five countries, with about 700 hours of flying over more than 300,000 square kilometres.

What so many elephants do to a riverfront

When tens of thousands of elephants converge on one river, the land feels it. Ecologists describe the Chobe riparian woodland as elephant-transformed: many of the large trees that once lined the river have been killed, and hardwoods such as the pod mahogany and Zambezi teak have been much reduced. Walking or driving along the riverfront, you can see the open, broken woodland and the bare sand that result.

The obvious answer would seem to be fewer elephants, but the research is more complicated. A study published in 2009 fenced off plots along the Chobe riverfront to see what would regrow. Inside plots that kept out all browsing animals, more than three-quarters of tree seedlings survived; in open plots, survival of the riverine Faidherbia albida was under 20 per cent, and impala, not just elephants, were eating the seedlings. The authors concluded that reducing elephant numbers alone would not restore the woodland. Culling elephants in Chobe has been considered in the past and rejected as too controversial.

People, politics and hard choices

Living alongside 130,000 elephants is not simple. Elephants raid crops, damage property and sometimes kill people, and communities in northern Botswana bear much of the cost. In 2014 Botswana banned trophy hunting; in May 2019, citing a growing elephant population and harm to farmers’ livelihoods, the government lifted the ban and introduced annual hunting quotas. Botswana has also argued at international meetings for the right to sell its stockpiled ivory, against a global ban on the trade in place since 1989.

The politics can be sharp. In April 2024, in a dispute over proposed German restrictions on importing hunting trophies, Botswana’s then president Mokgweetsi Masisi offered to send 20,000 elephants to Germany, describing the herds as a plague. Botswana had separately offered elephants to Angola and Mozambique. In November 2024, after an election in which his party lost power for the first time since independence, Duma Boko became president.

Not every threat is human. In 2020, hundreds of elephants, at least 330 and later reported as about 350, died in the Okavango Panhandle in north-western Botswana. The government concluded that they had been poisoned by toxins from cyanobacteria in waterholes, a finding supported by later research, though with some uncertainty because tissue samples were not collected.

Counting elephants, and arguing about the count

Knowing how many elephants there are, and how many are dying, depends on monitoring, mostly from the air. Survey aircraft fly set lines across the landscape while observers count animals and carcasses in a strip on either side. Botswana-based Elephants Without Borders, led by Mike Chase, conducted the Great Elephant Census, completed in 2016, which found a 30 per cent decline in savanna elephants across 18 countries between 2007 and 2014, while estimating Botswana’s population at around 130,000.

Monitoring can also be contested. In September 2018, Elephants Without Borders reported finding at least 87 elephants it believed had been poached in northern Botswana. The government called the claims false and misleading, saying that 53 carcasses had been counted and that many had died of natural causes; Chase stood by his findings. The episode showed how much rides on a count, and how hard it can be to agree on what it means.

Will we see elephants crossing the river?

There is a good chance, but no guarantee. Late August and early September fall at the height of the dry season, when elephants are most concentrated along the Chobe, and crossings to the floodplain islands are often seen from boats. One of these islands, known in Botswana as Sedudu and in Namibia as Kasikili, was the subject of a border dispute between the two countries; in December 1999 the International Court of Justice ruled that it belongs to Botswana. Wildlife moves on its own schedule, though, and your guides will go where the animals are.

How are the game drives and cruises arranged, and what will the weather be like?

The group stays at a lodge on the Chobe riverfront at the edge of Kasane, a short drive from the park. The programme includes an evening game drive on Day 14, an early-morning drive on Day 15, a sunset cruise on the Chobe River that evening, and a morning cruise with the ranger on Day 16, with free time between activities. In late August and early September, Kasane typically has warm to hot, dry days, with average highs around 29 to 33°C, and cool early mornings, with lows of around 13 to 17°C, so bring a warm layer for dawn drives. The tour is rated Level 2 (Moderate), which means managing three to five hours of activity a day and walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground; drives and cruises are seated.

Chobe on the Southern Africa route

The group arrives in Chobe from Victoria Falls, where our article on Victoria Falls geology explains how the Zambezi has cut its gorges; the Chobe joins the Zambezi a short distance downstream of Kasane. On the water, our guide to the Chobe River cruise explains how a boat changes what you see. Earlier in the trip, our article on Kruger National Park conservation looks at how South Africa has handled the same questions of water, fences and elephant numbers in a very different way. On Day 17 the group flies from Kasane back to Johannesburg. Our overview of the Southern Africa cultural journey shows how Chobe fits into the whole route.

Watching a herd drink at the Chobe, it helps to remember where they have come from and where they will go when the rains return. These elephants are part of one of the largest elephant populations in the world, moving across a landscape shared by five countries, and the choices made about water, fences and people will decide what that landscape looks like in the years ahead. It is worth seeing, and worth understanding.