We visited Kruger National Park at the end of a cruise across the Indian Ocean, from Darwin, Australia to Durban, South Africa. We spent 15 nights in the park, at various rest camps. While we had previously been to Kruger a handful of times, the main difference for this trip was our effort to sample insects at night via the use of ultraviolet lights at the camps where we stayed.

To spend any time in the evening looking at insects that were coming to the lights required some trade-off in time. It was hard to rise early for early morning game drives since we went to sleep late. Thus, our efforts to see the larger game that Kruger is known for was perhaps less productive that on some previous trips. Similarly, we had planned this trip to coincide with later in the wet season in Kruger, so that the insects were more abundant that during the cooler dry season. Inspection of seasonality of many moths from iNaturalist data showed this to be true. Planning a trip to maximize insect presence is not what most tourists would normally seek, but we found the conditions generally acceptable for all of our activities.

Perhaps unfortunately, the Kruger was more crowded than we expected, in part because of the school break that partly overlapped with our stay. Private and public schools in South Africa have different schedules, so it can be challenging to time a visit to the park. Of course, since our visit was tied to the arrival of the cruise ship in Durban, we didn’t have any flexibility of when to arrive in South Africa.

For basic background about the Kruger National Perk see our write-up here. The material below mostly focuses on the insect life that we documented, plus a few other aspects that are relevant to a wet-season visit.