Semuliki National Park
Congo Basin rainforest inside Uganda, with birds found nowhere else east of it.
Overview
Semuliki sits in Bundibugyo District on the floor of the Albertine Rift, pressed between the Rwenzori foothills and the Semliki River that marks the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was gazetted as a national park in 1993, and what it protects is an eastern outlier of the lowland rainforest of the Congo Basin — a different forest from anything else in East Africa, hot, flat and low, with a bird list to match. Birders come for Congo-basin species that are hard or impossible to see elsewhere on this side of the border: white-crested, red-billed dwarf and piping hornbills, Nkulengu rail, western bronze-naped pigeon, among several hundred recorded. The park’s other landmark is Sempaya, where two hot springs vent through the forest — Nyasimbi, the female spring, is a boiling geyser throwing steam well above head height, and the surrounding salt licks pull in birds and mammals.