Qualla: Mare aux Hippopotames

Mare aux Hippopotames: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marco Schmidt [1], CC BY-SA 3.0. At dusk the water begins to move. What looked like smooth gray boulders along the lake's surface lift, exhale, and resolve into the broad backs and twitching ears of hippopotamuses - perhaps a hundred of them, dividing into family groups as the day's heat releases its grip. This is the Mare aux Hippopotames, the Lake of Hippopotamuses, a sheet of fresh water cradled in the floodplain of the Black Volta in southwestern Burkina Faso. It is the only place in the entire country that UNESCO has named a Biosphere Reserve, and the hippos are the reason its name endures.

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Image: Marco Schmidt [1] | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mare aux Hippopotames: A Lake That Breathes With the Seasons

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alfrednadjere, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Mare is not a fixed thing. It swells and shrinks with the floodwaters of the Black Volta, which the French call the Volta Noire, fed by a Sudanese climate of two blunt seasons: eight dry months, four wet ones. When the rains come, the lake spreads into a maze of pools and mar...

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Image: Alfrednadjere | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mare aux Hippopotames: More Than Hippos

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alfrednadjere, CC BY-SA 4.0. The hippopotamuses give the lake its name, but they share it with a remarkable cast. West African crocodiles glide the shallows. Sable antelope and other large antelope move through the savannah, patas monkeys race across open ground on their long legs, and warthogs root in the m...

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Image: Alfrednadjere | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mare aux Hippopotames: Living With Giants

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alfrednadjere, CC BY-SA 4.0. A hippopotamus is not the placid creature of cartoons. They are among the most formidable animals in Africa, fiercely territorial in water and capable of moving with startling speed. For the communities who live around the Mare, coexistence is a daily negotiation: shared water, s...

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Image: Alfrednadjere | CC BY-SA 4.0