Month by month
Samburu in August
August takes 2 mm of rain on the thirty-year average, the second driest month of the year after September, with days of 30.8°C and nights of 18.9°C. It is the middle of the long dry season and the busiest month on the northern circuit.
If you only want the answer
Peak conditions, peak demand and very little that separates it from July on the weather. The bush is thin, the seasonal water is gone and the game is working the Ewaso Ng'iro daily. Book early, and if you want the same conditions with fewer vehicles, look at Shaba or at the community conservancies next door.
Two millimetres, and what that does to the bush
August's normals are 2 mm of rain, 30.8°C by day and 18.9°C at night, with no full wet day on the average. By now the reserves have taken 10 mm since the end of May and the seasonal pans have long gone.
The honest comparison with July is that the weather is the same, within half a degree and a millimetre. What changes is the crowd: high season on the Nairobi flights runs 16 June to 31 October, and Sarara's published rate card holds its top price of $1,515 per person a night through July and August.
One river, three reserves
The dry-season mechanism is at full strength. The Ewaso Ng'iro is the only permanent water left, so the elephants come down to drink and cross it daily, and the riverine strip of doum palms is where most sightings happen. Leopard is present and shy, and that strip early and late is the realistic chance, since no leopard population figure exists for these reserves at all: Kenya's national census explicitly leaves the species out.
Away from the water, the open ground is where the northern specials are. Beisa oryx stand out in small mixed groups, gerenuk browse upright on their hind legs in the thorn scrub, and Grevy's zebra often mix with plains zebra, which makes the difference in stripe pattern and ear shape obvious at a glance.
Getting round the crowd
Three things spread the load. Shaba, east of Archer's Post, is the largest of the three reserves at 239 km2 and has a single regular lodge inside it. Buffalo Springs, across the river in Isiolo County, charges $70 against Samburu's $85. And the community conservancies that ring the reserves, Westgate, Kalama and Namunyak, allow night drives, walking and off-road driving that the reserves do not.
If you do intend to cross the river between Samburu and Buffalo Springs, plan on paying both counties. Two finance acts set two different amounts and no reciprocity between them has ever been published, so a single ticket covering both is something to confirm at the gate rather than assume.