A blend of diverse landscapes; riverine woodland to expansive savannah woodlands, escarpments and towering cliffs, Ruma National Park welcomes you to Homa Bay in Kenya’s Nyanza region.
The position of the park in the vast Lambwe Valley – between Kanyamwa Escarpment and Ruri Hills – has given it an epic birdlife with over 400 bird species. In short, this is the place bird enthusiasts should visit in Kenya whilst immersing themselves in a different kind of ecology.
Ruma National Park, established in 1966 as Lambwe Valley Game Reserve remains a fairly unknown park but in it lies utmost pleasure in seeing the world’s endangered Roan Antelope which is the only remaining species in Africa of the 76,000 surviving Roan Antelopes in the world. It has since been christened the “Last Retreat of The Roan Antelope”.
There remain only 12 Roan Antelopes in the woodlands of the park today, decimated mostly through poaching. Roan Antelopes are Kenya’s third-largest and are distinctively grey and large. They usually live in herds of about 20 led by a bull Roan Antelope.
Ruma Park also hosts the endangered blue swallow which survives on the park’s moist grassland for feeding and roosting. Blue Swallows are African migratory birds which live in Southern Tanzania but migrate to Ruma in Kenya In April for roosting before leaving in September.
Oribi Antelopes, the smaller types with the bare black patch below its ears and short black-tipped tail live in pairs on the park’s grassland, especially in areas where the population is dense.
The sights of African leopards, cape buffalos, Rothschild’s giraffes, eastern black rhinos, honey badgers, bush pigs and vervet monkeys, hyenas, serval cats and impalas are some of the mammals making up the ecosystem of Kenya’s only terrestrial park in Nyanza.
Snakes, terrifying though, are many and are easy to spot. The forest cobra, eastern green mamba, black mouthed cobra, puff adder, python and the African Spitting Cobra take your senses off the rail while lizards, skinks and geckos fill the list of reptiles in this park.
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