Month by month
Samburu in January
January opens the short dry window and brings the coolest nights of the Samburu year, 18.2°C on the thirty-year average. Rainfall drops to 26 mm over four rain days after December's 60 mm, so the country is still carrying the green of the short rains while the tracks firm up.
If you only want the answer
A good, comfortable month without being the peak. The short rains have stopped, the nights are the coolest of the year, and the migrant birds that arrived in November are still here. Game is not yet pinned to the river the way it is from June onwards, so expect to work a little harder for sightings than in September.
The coolest nights on the card
January's normals are 26 mm of rain across four rain days, days of 30.9°C and nights of 18.2°C, the lowest night figure of the twelve months. December ran at 60 mm over six days, so the drop is real and you can feel it in the tracks, which dry out through the month.
In practice that means a fleece at the 06:00 gate and shirtsleeves by eight, with afternoons warm rather than punishing. Compare it with September, when the afternoon sits at 32.4°C, and January is the more comfortable month to be outside in by some distance.
A dry window, though not the dry season
Samburu has two dry spells and this is the shorter one. January and February take 26 and 29 mm, which is dry compared with March's 68 mm and April's 70 mm, and wet compared with the long dry run of June to September, where the four months together take 11 mm.
That difference shows up in where the animals are. From June the Ewaso Ng'iro is the only permanent water in the landscape and the game comes to it. In January there is still water left in the bush from the short rains, so the river is one option among several and the herds are more spread out. The elephants are still along the river, since Save the Elephants has more than 900 identified individuals using these reserves, though you may spend longer finding the rest of the list.
Fees and flights in January
Nothing at the gate changes with the season. A non-resident adult pays $85 at Samburu National Reserve under Samburu County's finance act and $70 at Buffalo Springs or Shaba under Isiolo County's, in January exactly as in August, and there is no published combined ticket between the two counties.
The flights do treat January as peak. Safarilink's 2026 timetable counts 1 January to 31 March as high season, which adds its third daily service on the northern circuit, though the listed fare of $289 one way is the same all year. Book the festive-period return legs early, since early January still carries holiday traffic out of Nairobi.