- A baboon troop regularly forages in the scrubland in and around the village of Rooiels, on the outskirts of the Cape Town metropolitan area.
- In neighboring villages, municipal workers fire paintball guns and blow trumpets to drive baboons out, but most Rooiels residents are opposed to having their troop monitored or harassed.
- Rooiels residents have developed — and accepted — guidelines to reduce conflict, including securing their waste, baboon-proofing their doors and windows, and educating each other on how to respond during encounters.
- Cape Town’s scientific lead for baboon management says education and collaboration has allowed baboons to coexist with their human neighbors here, but that this model may be specific to this location.
ROOIELS, South Africa — Baboons aren’t exactly punctual, but Gavin Lundie still expected them to appear in the village around 9 a.m. “They’re coming!” his wife Lesley called. Members of the Rooiels baboon troop had begun to make their way down. Lesley made her way to the sliding doors on their patio and secured it with two shoelaces attached to a hook. She remained on the balcony and watched as the troop entered into the village a few properties away.
The Lundies live in Rooiels, a small, affluent village on False Bay, approximately 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Cape Town’s city center. The village, scattered from the coastal flats up the slopes of the Klein Hangklip mountain, is part of the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve. The mountain’s cliff faces offer sleeping baboons (Papio ursinus) protection from leopards, their natural predator, but the sparse vegetation doesn’t offer enough for them to eat or drink. In contrast, the lower slopes, where the village has grown up, is still covered with dense fynbos scrub on undeveloped plots, in gardens and along unpaved verges.
The baboons forage on a range of flowers, seeds and berries in the warmer months; in winter, when the fynbos is dormant, the baboons eat kikuyu grass from lawns in the village. They also eat limpets in the intertidal zone, and the Rooiels River is a year-round source of freshwater.
Why share a habitat?
Joselyn Mormile, the conservation scientist who runs the City of Cape Town’s baboon program, did her Ph.D. research on human-baboon interface at Rooiels. “Historically, they would have been coming [to Rooiels] anyway,” she told Mongabay.
“One of the biggest issues is that we choose to live in the same place that baboons would naturally live, which are low-lying areas, areas next to the coast,” she added.
In neighboring villages, staff with municipal baboon-monitoring programs fire paintball guns and blow vuvuzelas — the annoyingly loud horns made infamous at the 2010 World Cup hosted in South Africa — to drive baboons out. But in Rooiels, most residents are opposed to having their troop monitored.
As the baboons entered the village, they approached a truck parked next to a construction site. One of the construction workers knelt down next to the truck, picked up a few rocks, and threw them at the passing animals.
Lundie very calmly explained to the worker: “You don’t have to throw rocks at them, they aren’t dangerous. They won’t harm you.”
“But they stole my colleague’s lunch the other day,” the man protested.
“So keep it in the truck,” Lundie replied.
“But they open the door.”
“Then lock the door.”
“But the doors can’t lock, and our boss told us that if they break the mirrors or the windows we have to pay.”
Lundie explained to the man that the troop comes into the village in the mornings to forage, so the men only need to guard their vehicle’s doors for a few minutes while the animals passed through, then they would be fine. Realizing that though wild the troop was not a threat, the construction workers fear turned into fascination. A minute later, he had swapped rocks for his phone and begun filming the primates as the rest of the troop crossed the road.
A pathway to coexistence
Across the village, residents secure their windows with store-bought or homemade baboon-proofing fixtures, keeping gaps smaller than 7 centimeters, less than 3 inches. Other devices limit how wide their doors can open, so that they don’t have to keep them completely closed when baboons are present. Some residents have steel mesh sliding doors that still allow in lots of light and air when closed.
All residents secure their waste using bins with locking mechanisms that the baboons can’t open. Many keep their bins behind locked doors except on trash collection day. Residents are also discouraged from having bird feeders outside their homes. They know that having fewer attractants on their properties makes it easier to shoo the baboons away.
The Rooiels Baboon Coexistence Task team has drawn up a comprehensive document that includes guidelines for dealing with baboons in homes. People are asked to remain calm, lift their arms, and firmly tell the baboon to leave, while allowing it to keep whatever it may already have in its hands and making sure that it has a clear exit path. Residents are also cautioned against panicking as this might cause the baboon to also panic and defecate. When residents encounter baboons outdoors, they’re encouraged to keep their food hidden.
Mormile said even effective baboon management doesn’t eliminate negative encounters with the primates. Baboon-proofing houses minimizes intrusions, and understanding how to behave when they do enter homes leads to less traumatic interactions.
Kay Leresche, who has lived in Rooiels for more than 25 years, said a lot of negative attitudes toward baboons are formed when residents first move in. “Sometimes baboons get in and people get scared because they aren’t used to them and they don’t know that they don’t hurt you,” she said.
“When I first came here, I had a cheap security gate and I didn’t know they could get in. I had the whole troop in my house for a day. You have no idea the mess. Nothing was broken but there was mess everywhere, all over the house. It was absolutely a nightmare,” she said.
One day more recently, Leresche forgot to close a window or door and she found a juvenile baboon poking around her freezer. “I leaned across him, picked up a piece of fruit, gave him the apple. Then said ‘Now, come on out!’ And off he went,” she said.
Jaco Grobler, another long-term resident, said there are two types of residents: the huggers, and the non-huggers. “I love baboons, but you cannot accommodate the baboons to the nth degree,” he said.
“There needs to be a strong message. Don’t allow them to come onto your property, onto your car. Don’t take pictures of them. They need to be scared of humans. And by that, I don’t say catapult them, paintball them, whatever the case may be … If a baboon gets onto your house, chase him and he will leave.”
Changing character of the village
However, the established locals are aware that new residents may not want to live in a way that is conducive to coexisting with baboons. Leresche said the remaining undeveloped plots of land in Rooiels have been sold to build new houses, shrinking the amount of available fynbos scrub where baboons can forage.
“Each time we have done the surveys, the results are roughly 10% against and 20% pro-baboons at the extremes, and then the rest are the middle, but mostly tending towards accepting. I think at this time we’re slightly more pro-baboons,” she said.
Mormile is respectful of what has been achieved in Rooiels. “A willingness to baboon-proof, regardless of attitude toward wildlife, shows that the education and collaboration in Rooiels was able to transcend personal beliefs on sharing space with baboons for a common goal of preventing baboon access to houses,” she wrote in her thesis.
But, as the city’s scientific lead for baboon management, she said the approach may be specific to this location. “I advocate for responsible human behavior (e.g. baboon-proofing homes, bins, not feeding wildlife) as well as a combination of fencing and human rangers, but in my opinion, the topography and landscape in Rooiels make the latter approach unlikely to succeed in any meaningful way,” Mormile said.
Her fieldwork in the village points to how quickly the ideals of coexistence break down where the wider world touches the confines of Rooiels: the highway. During the time she observed the troop for her Ph.D., its population averaged around 24. “The fact that the troop’s size remained small despite the nutritional and ecological benefits of utilising the urban space was a result of their high mortality rate,” she said.
“In Rooiels, motor vehicle collisions resulted in high mortality rates, but the troop continued to cross the road to enter the village on a near daily basis,” she wrote in her thesis. All the deaths occurred on the R44, a highway that runs through Rooiels.
Ralph Pina, chair of the Rooiels Conservancy, said most of the baboon deaths in the last eight and a half years have happened outside of the bounds of the village, and that many of them occurred when baboons crossed the R44, where motorists are known to speed, to get to unmanaged waste at tourist lookout points.
“I dispute that the coexistence model is why they get getting killed on the road. They’re getting killed on the road over there because of the bin business,” Pina said.
Exodus
At 3 p.m. on this hot afternoon, the troop had gathered on Anemone Street, at the northern entrance to the village. Juvenile baboons played on the roof of the Italian restaurant on the eastern side of the street, above a board advertising tiramisu and other enticing meals, while the alpha male perched himself on the highest point, the parapet of the building, branded “Something Els.” A few meters past the adjacent tuckshop (the local equivalent of a bodega) and pub — right beneath a signboard with information on baboons — an adult male tried in vain to open a municipal bin. Two older females foraged in the fynbos on the verge, next to a traffic circle.
The restaurants, pub and shop here all have gates to prevent baboons from coming in, and they’ve taken the same precautions with waste as the other village residents. One of the restaurants has electric fencing to prevent the agile animals from accessing an upper deck.
Over busy periods such as Easter weekend,” baboon information officers” explain to visiting patrons how to behave around the primates, including practical tips like double-checking that they’ve locked their car doors, and staying alert when carrying tasty leftovers back to their cars.
On this February afternoon, one group of visitors with Dutch accents curiously filmed several subadult baboons that were resting on the street and picking at the bushes next to it, while others watched through the restaurant windows.
Another visitor shouted threateningly at one of the subadults that was calmly walking on the street near his child, causing the baboon to run and take cover in a bush.
While the baboons exhibited typical baboon behavior, it was the humans that were unpredictable.
“On hot days like this, they like to go to the river,” Lundie said of the baboons. As members of the troop began to cross the R44, a winding coastal road with a number of blind curves, two cars heading north came around a bend. The car in front slowed to allow the troop to cross the road, while the driver behind him honked loudly, cursed, and overtook and sped off.
The mother baboons carried their babies across the highway’s two lanes, with the older juveniles following closely. On the other far side, they hopped into the canal, disappearing but for the bends of their tails as they stooped down to drink from the narrow stream of water that flowed down it.
Once they’d had enough, they went up into the fynbos as they made their way into Riverview, the eastern part of Rooiels adjacent to the river, and to their roosts for the night.
Banner image: Baboons at the village of Rooi Els, on the outskirts of Cape Town. Image by Barry Christianson for Mongabay.
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