Month by month
Mana Pools in March
March is when the rains lose interest in Mana Pools: the thirty-year average drops to 49 mm over just 5 rain days. The damage of the previous months is already done, though, and the valley needs weeks of sun before anyone drives it.
If you only want the answer
Mana Pools stays effectively closed through March while the ground dries. In some years the floodplain becomes reachable late in the month; do not build a plan on it.
Drying, not yet dry
The figures look almost friendly: 49 mm of rain, days of 30.8°C, nights of 22.1°C. The problem is what January and February left behind. Black-cotton soil holds its water long after the sky clears, and a track that looks firm at the surface will swallow an axle a metre later.
The dirt airstrips recover on the same slow schedule, so flying in is no more dependable than driving. Like February, March is a closed month in practice; the one difference is that March's problem is drainage rather than falling rain.
Why the calendar says April
No gazetted reopening exists to wait for. What exists is the camp calendar: the earliest operations, Kavinga on the southern boundary and Zambezi Expeditions on the river, open on 1 April, and nothing inside the park trades before they do.
If you are determined to test a dry late March, the only honest source is the Mana Pools station office on +263 718 058 794, called a few days before you would descend. An answer given a month out is worthless.
Book April before March ends
April is the best birding month of the Mana Pools year, the one slot where summer migrants overlap with an open park, and it sells on short lead times because most travellers chase the dry season instead. March is your last comfortable moment to claim it.
Self-drivers eyeing April should also book Nyamepi now; the campsite itself rarely fills that early in the season, but the riverfront sites worth having are another matter.