Kruger National Park Conservation: Water, Fences and Wildlife Management

Kruger National Park looks like wilderness: two million hectares of bushveld running some 360 kilometres along South Africa’s border with Mozambique, crossed by rivers and home to elephant, lion, rhino and hundreds of other species. But almost nothing about what you see from a game vehicle is untouched by decisions people have made. Where the water is, where the fences run, how many elephants there are and who once lived here have all been shaped by more than a century of management, some of it now regretted. Kruger National Park conservation is the story of how those decisions were made and unmade. On Days 9 and 10 of our Southern Africa Tour, the group stays at a lodge on the edge of the park, with game drives led by its rangers.

From hunting reserve to national park

On 26 March 1898, the government of Paul Kruger’s South African Republic proclaimed a game reserve between the Sabie and Crocodile rivers, mainly to control hunting. Its first warden, a Scottish soldier named James Stevenson-Hamilton, took charge in 1902 and stayed until 1946. Local people called him Skukuza, usually translated as the man who swept clean, and the park’s main camp still carries the name.

In 1926, under the National Parks Act steered through parliament by Piet Grobler, the Sabie and Shingwedzi reserves were joined and renamed Kruger National Park. The first three tourist cars drove in the following year. The founding story is not as simple as it was once told. The historian Jane Carruthers has shown that thousands of Black residents lived in the reserve in its early years, around 4,100 in 1911, and argues that hunting controls helped push them into wage labour. She also disputes the traditional image of Paul Kruger as a conservationist.

Water: the great experiment

For most of the twentieth century, Kruger’s managers believed the park needed more water. Boreholes were sunk from 1927 and the first concrete dam was built in 1931, and the programme accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s. Eventually the park had more than 300 boreholes and about 50 dams, so that animals could find water almost anywhere, in almost any season.

It turned out to be a mistake, or at least a costly one. Spreading water across the park favoured species that need to drink often, such as zebra, buffalo and elephant, and their numbers rose. Around the water points, vegetation was overgrazed and soils eroded. Rarer antelope that prefer dry, open country with few competitors, including roan, sable and tsessebe, declined, as did the brown hyena. Dams also changed the rivers: on the Shingwedzi, 19 fish species disappeared downstream of one dam within 11 years of its construction.

From the late 1990s, the policy was reversed. More than 150 boreholes have been closed and more than half of all the park’s artificial water points shut down. In April 2018, army engineers used explosives to remove the Kanniedood dam on the Shingwedzi, along with several other dams and weirs, and the last of the concrete at Kanniedood and Sirheni was cleared in March 2026. The aim is to let rainfall and the rivers, rather than pumps, decide where animals go.

Tourism is part of the same balancing act. Kruger received about 1.66 million visitors in 2014–15, and more since, and its rest camps, roads and lodges sit within the same landscape the managers are trying to protect. Managing the park means managing its visitors too.

Rivers that start outside the park

Kruger’s five perennial rivers, the Crocodile, Sabie, Olifants, Letaba and Luvuvhu, all rise outside the park, and the Limpopo runs along its northern border. That makes the park dependent on what happens upstream: farming, mining, towns and dams all take water and add pollution before it reaches the park. In the winter of 2008, about 170 dead crocodiles were collected in the Olifants River, killed by a disease of their fat tissue whose cause was never confirmed, and the population in the Olifants Gorge fell from at least 1,000 to around 400. In a drought in 2019, the park’s water manager reported that the Letaba had, to all intents and purposes, stopped flowing.

Kruger’s response has been to manage by watching. Out of a long research programme on the park’s rivers in the 1990s came a system called strategic adaptive management. Scientists set measurable limits, called thresholds of potential concern, for things like river flow, plant cover and animal numbers, and managers act when a threshold is crossed, then check whether their action worked.

Fences, and taking them down

For decades, Kruger was a fenced park. Around 1960, veterinary authorities fenced its western and southern boundaries to keep wildlife diseases away from livestock, and in 1974 the government decided to fence the eastern boundary with Mozambique as well.

Since the 1990s, the trend has been the other way. In June 1993, the fences between Kruger and a group of private reserves along its western edge, including Timbavati and Klaserie, came down, creating what is now called the Greater Kruger. On 9 December 2002, South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe signed a treaty creating the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, joining Kruger with Limpopo National Park in Mozambique and Gonarezhou in Zimbabwe. About 50 kilometres of fence was dropped and almost 5,000 animals were moved into the Mozambican park. Removing fences has its costs: in 2024 farmers near Giyani, on the park’s western side, reported losing cattle to predators along broken fence lines, and veterinarians warn of disease where livestock and wildlife mix.

The transfrontier park is as much a political project as an ecological one. In 2006 a new border post opened at Giriyondo, letting visitors drive between Kruger and Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park inside the protected area. The idea is that animals, and eventually tourism income, can move across a landscape that colonial borders divided, though it depends on cooperation between three countries.

How many elephants is too many?

No question in Kruger has been argued over longer. In 1967 the park began culling elephants to keep the population near a target of about 7,000, a figure based on one elephant per square mile. Over the following decades, 14,629 elephants were culled, until culling stopped in the mid-1990s. One critic, writing in the Daily Maverick, has called the original target a thumb-suck.

Without culling, the population has grown. A 2021 census counted 27,998 elephants, growing at about 4 per cent a year. National norms and standards for managing elephants were published in 2008. In practice, Kruger has leaned on indirect tools, above all closing water points: one modelling study suggested that water closures had slowed elephant population growth to about a third of its earlier rate. The debate is not over. Elephants push over and strip large trees, changing the landscape, and how much change a park should accept is as much a question of values as of science.

The rhino crisis

Around 2013 there were more than 9,000 rhinos in the park; by the end of 2022, after years of poaching, there were about 1,850 white rhino and 210 black rhino. Poaching peaked in 2014, when 827 rhinos were killed in Kruger alone. The park responded with intensive anti-poaching work and with dehorning: by the end of 2022, around 70 per cent of its rhinos had had their horns removed, which takes away the reason to kill them. National poaching numbers have fallen since, but the pressure on Kruger has not gone away: 88 rhinos were poached in the park in 2024 and 175 in 2025.

The people of the park

Conservation in Kruger is also a story of people and land. In 1969, around 1,500 members of the Makuleke community were forcibly removed from their land in the far north of the park, around Pafuri, between the Luvuvhu and Limpopo rivers. After 1994 they lodged a land claim, and in May 1998 a settlement returned the land to them. Rather than moving back, the community agreed to keep it as a contractual park within Kruger for 50 years, running tourism on it while SANParks manages conservation. It is widely cited as an example of land restitution within a protected area.

Drought, floods and a changing climate

Kruger has always lived with extremes, but recent ones have been severe. The drought of 2015–16 hit grazing animals hard: one study found that a buffalo population fell from about 3,000 to 1,000 between 2015 and 2017, and in one area hippos dropped from around 375 to 15. In September 2016, SANParks culled around 350 hippo and buffalo. Ten years later came the opposite. In January 2026, floods forced the evacuation of camps in the north of the park and badly damaged camps including Letaba and Balule, with repairs estimated at R950 million. South Africa’s environment minister said extreme rainfall and flooding events were becoming more frequent and severe.

Why is late August a good time to visit Kruger?

Because it is the end of the dry season. By late August the bush has thinned and the grass is short, so animals are easier to see, and with many seasonal pans dry and so many artificial water points now closed, wildlife concentrates near the rivers and the water that remains. Days are usually warm and nights cool. The rains, which turn the bush green and dense again, normally arrive later in the year.

Are the game drives inside Kruger itself?

Partly, and it depends on timing. The tour’s lodge sits just outside the park’s southern boundary, across the Crocodile River, and drives are led by the lodge’s own rangers. Kruger’s gates close at night, so evening drives may take place outside the park rather than within it, while daytime drives can enter Kruger itself. Your Tour Leader will explain the plan for each drive on the day.

How many game drives are there, and how early are the starts?

The Kruger stay includes three drives: an evening drive on Day 9, after the flight from Johannesburg to Nelspruit, and an early-morning and an evening drive on Day 10, with a free morning at the lodge in between. Early starts are part of safari life, because animals are most active in the cool of the morning. Drives are seated, though climbing in and out of open vehicles takes a step up. 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. Sightings are never guaranteed.

Kruger on the Southern Africa route

The group flies from Johannesburg to Nelspruit on Day 9. On Day 11 it leaves the Lowveld by road and climbs onto the Drakensberg escarpment along the Panorama Route, with its canyon views and potholes. Later in the trip, the elephants of Chobe National Park in northern Botswana offer a direct comparison with Kruger: a different park, a different country, and a different set of choices about how to live with large numbers of elephants. Our guide to visiting South Africa’s game reserves covers the practical side of a safari, and our overview of the Southern Africa cultural journey shows how Kruger fits into the full route.

Watching an elephant herd at a river, it is easy to forget the boreholes, fences, culls and court-settled land claims behind the scene. Knowing them does not make the moment less special. If anything it makes it more so, because it shows how much care, argument and second thinking it takes to keep a place like Kruger looking wild.