Murchison Falls National Park

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Murchison Falls National Park lies in north western Uganda, spreading inland from the shore of Lake Albert around the Victoria Nile. It is named for the Murchison Falls waterfall, itself named for a president of the Royal Geographical Society. The park is known for its wildlife which has partly recovered from a massacre by poachers and troops under Idi Amin. The national park neighbours Budongo Central Forest Reserve, Kaduma Game Reserve and Aswa-Lolim Game Reserve.

Murchison Falls Conservation Area is one of the oldest, and is the largest, protected area (PA) in Uganda. It is comprised of Murchison Falls National Park, Bugungu Wildlife Refuge and Karuma Wildlife Refuge. Currently, the national park itself encompasses 3,893 km². Bugungu Wildlife Refuge (501 km²) and Karuma Wildlife Refuge (678 km²) are adjacent and act as buffer zones for the park. In addition is Budongo Forest Reserve which overlaps parts of both wildlife reserves, and covers an additional 591 km². This makes a total of 5,663 km² of space that is under some level of protection through controlled use (more than twice the land area of Rhode Island in the United States). The national park and the two wildlife reserves are managed by the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) as the Murchison Falls Conservation Area (MFCA) and the Budongo Forest Reserve is managed by the National Forestry Association except where it overlaps with UWA-managed lands.

The history of the establishment of these protected areas has had a strong influence on the state of their ecosystems and the attitudes of the local people towards them. It is therefore important to relay some of that history here before addressing the current issues of conservation as they relate to the local people. The history of these parks spans several administrations. They began to be established during the colonial era, when Uganda was a British protectorate (1894 – 1962). Since independence in 1962, the system has survived some difficult periods under presidents Milton Obote (1962-1971 and 1979 - 1986) and Idi Amin (1971 - 1979), and is now stabilizing somewhat under the current administration of President Yoweri Museveni (1986 – present). There were some short periods of time when others were in power, but they were generally in office for too short a period of time to strongly influence the direction of the country.

The following history and statistics are taken from the Murchison Falls Conservation Area General Management Plan for 2001 – 2011 (UWA, 2001). Between the years of 1907 and 1912, the inhabitants of an area of about 13,000 km² were evacuated due to sleeping sickness spread by tse-tse flies. This paved the way for the establishment of the Bunyoro Game Reserve in 1910, which encompassed roughly the area south of the Nile River that is now part of the National Park in Masindi District. In 1928 the boundaries were extended into Gulu District north of the river, and the resulting protected area (PA) became known as the Bunyoro-Gulu Game Reserve. As the human population had already been evacuated due to sleeping sickness, it was possible to establish this game reserve without displacing any of the local people for the sake of the park. This is significant, as forced evacuations have often created animosity on the part of locals towards protected areas and their staff.

In 1932, the Budongo Forest Reserve was established. This became the first commercial logging concession in Uganda, and to date is one of the most intensively studied “working” forests in the world. The boundaries of this forest continued to expand over the next thirty years until they reached the current size of 825 km². Much animosity was created by this process as locals lost land and never quite knew where the boundaries were due to the frequent changes.

In 1952, the British administration established the National Parks Act of Uganda. After forty years of reduced hunting in the Bunyoro-Gulu Game Reserve, the animal populations had expanded to an extent that justified upgrading the reserve, which became Murchison Falls National Park, one of the first two national parks, along with Queen Elizabeth NP. By the mid-1960’s, Murchison Falls had become the premier safari destination in all of East Africa, with over 60,000 visitors per year.

With the receding of the sleeping sickness outbreak, people began to repopulate the areas around the new national park. It was realized that a buffer zone of controlled-use lands was needed around the park to lessen encroachment and poaching pressures. In 1963 the Karuma and Bugungu Controlled Hunting Areas were established, but this status conferred little actual protection. To give the government more “teeth” to control activities in these areas, they were upgraded to Game Reserves. Karuma was upgraded in1964 and Bugungu in 1968. The establishment of these PAs led to the forced eviction of some villages and new restrictions on hunting and the use of other resources. Today, there are still older villagers who remember when they had free access to the lands that are now part of Karuma and Bugungu Game Reserves. These memories, and ongoing struggles to procure food, building materials and other necessities, cause some of the conflict today between park staff and local communities. The increase in the numbers of large mammals came to an abrupt reversal from the late 1970’s to the mid-1980’s. Soldiers in the armies of Idi Amin and Milton Obote would fly over Murchison Falls National Park in helicopters, shooting animals for food and for target practice. The combination of political instability in the 70s and 80s, and the decrease in the populations of wildlife, resulted in a sharp decline in visitor numbers. Even today, because of the rebel activities of the Lord’s Resistance Army in the north, Peace Corps volunteers and employees of the U.S. Government are not allowed north of the Nile River in Uganda, which includes most of Murchison Falls National Park. Annual visitation went from 60,000 per year in the 1960’s to only 2000 by 1999. The numbers are increasing again, although last year (2004), still only 9,500 people visited the park as tourists. This has a huge impact on the funds that are available for managing the PA, as entrance fees, lodge concessions fees and other user fees contribute a significant amount to park budgets.

If there can be a bright side to such wanton slaughter of wildlife, it is the opportunity for recovery that was given to the land. Fourteen thousand elephants can do an immense amount of damage to woodlands. When these animals were able to follow their traditional migratory routes, this impact was spread out over a very large area. With the increasing human population, the elephants were no longer able to migrate. This concentrated their activities primarily within the park boundaries, causing unsustainable pressures on the woodlands. The Rabongo Forest in the Southeastern section of the park saw a 52% reduction in trees between 1932 to 1956 (Mann, 2002). Although some of this can be attributed to logging, the most significant decrease was in species that are palatable to elephants and the composition shifted to less-favored species, indicating that elephants played more of a role in deforestation than logging during that time. In the last 25 years, due to the sharp decline in elephant numbers, the amount of woodland in the park has increased from 18% of total area to 75% of total area (Mann, 2002). Park management is actively trying to determine the appropriate balance of savannah and woodland, and the number of elephants that can be supported by the Murchison Falls ecosystem without tipping that balance.

Murchison Falls Conservation Area is in a unique position. It is a park surrounded by lands that are marginal for farming, so there is little pressure to convert the protected area to farmlands except in the Karuma Wildlife Reserve in the south. The populations in many of the communities around the conservation area are still low enough that with sufficient resources, a pro-active and inclusive approach can be taken to involve the local people in wildlife management. There are viable breeding populations of many “charismatic” mammal and bird species which will continue to draw tourists, and those populations are still well below the carrying capacity of the land. There has been a period of over 20 years of very low impact by animals on the ecosystem. Not only does this mean that the park is poised to grow as a safari destination, but all of these factors combine to create an excellent laboratory to study the resilience of faunal species after a rapid decline, as well as vegetation succession patterns. Yet at the current time, almost no ecological research is being done in the conservation area.