Month by month
Mana Pools in February
Mana Pools has no gate that locks in February and no notice board that says closed. What it has is 155 mm of rain falling on black-cotton soil, which settles the matter more firmly than any regulation could.
If you only want the answer
Mana Pools is shut in practice for all of February. The closure is a road condition rather than a rule, the reopening date moves with the weather, and April is the earliest month to plan around.
Practical closure, not a gazetted one
Zimbabwe's parks handle the rains differently. Gonarezhou closes formally, with published dates; Mana Pools never has. ZimParks publishes no closing or reopening date at all, and sources place the inaccessible window anywhere from mid-December to the end of March, because the roads decide and the roads answer to nobody.
For you as a planner, that vagueness matters more than any single date. A trip pencilled for late March can die on a wet week, so the sensible rule is to treat the park as unreachable from December through March and let anything earlier be a bonus.
The valley in mid-rains
February's thirty-year line reads 155 mm over 13 rain days, with 29.7°C days against 22.2°C nights, a shade drier than January but the same soaked country. Impala lambs and other newborns from the early rains are on their feet, and the predators that follow them are dispersed far from any road you could drive.
Long Pool and its siblings are brimming, the Zambezi runs high past the empty campsites, and the winterthorn woodland stands in water. The park is doing its off-season work.
The window that is actually open is a booking window
While the floodplain is unreachable, the coming season's scarcest beds are being claimed. Musangu and Muchichiri, the two special lodges near park HQ, are the first ZimParks units to sell out, and the September weeks across the private camps are moving now.
If clean light matters more to you than packed riverbanks, aim at May and book it this month. If you want the peak instead, February is already late for September and you should move accordingly.