MyKrugerHoliday
Photo: Photographs: Ettore Balocchi (upper left), Bjørn Christian Tørrissen (upper right), Marco Schmidt (bottom left), Genet (bottom right). Montage by RoRo · CC BY-SA 3.0 · source ↗
Sausage tree
Worsboom · Kigelia africana
The sausage tree is the riverine oddity everyone photographs, named for its enormous woody fruit. Those hanging sausages can weigh several kilograms, so parking under one is a gamble.
Log your Sausage tree sighting — free →How to identify it
Unmistakable when fruiting: huge grey, sausage-shaped fruits up to a metre long hang on rope-like stalks. A spreading tree of riverbanks with a rounded crown; big velvety maroon flowers dangle beneath the canopy in spring.
Flowers & fruit
Maroon bell-shaped flowers roughly August–November; the giant sausage fruits then hang for months, from about December through to the following winter.
Browsed by
Elephant and kudu occasionally browse the leaves; baboons, monkeys, bushpigs and porcupines eat the fruit; kudu, impala and duiker eat the fallen flowers, and monkeys and antelope take nectar from the blooms.
Where to see it in Kruger
Along rivers and on moist alluvial ground throughout the park; a characteristic riverine tree rather than one of the open bushveld.
Did you know
The deep-maroon flowers open at night and smell unpleasant to us because they are geared to bat and sunbird pollinators rather than bees.
See it? Log it — free.
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