Greetings global travelers and welcome to another edition of The Shape of The Cape with your host Julescape. Here we are on the southernmost shoreline of the south Cape coast of Africa with the Indian Ocean just below us in today’s video clips. I have just come across a troop of baboons in the wild or in their natural habitat here on the south coast of Africa. It’s a rare moment to be able to capture them on video like this, which has made my exploratory hike worthwhile today.
The ability to see the local wildlife in their habitat like this is what makes the exploration of this region so special. Africa is famous for its elephant, lion, rhinoceros and other powerful indigenous creatures. Some of them seem so pre-historic, and the way things are going on the planet, I wouldn’t be surprised of some of them go extinct in my lifetime.
It is a harsh reality of our planet today that some of these creatures are hunted illegally for use as "muti" or medicine if you prefer, without concern for their extinction. The price on their heads is so high that greed overrides any thought of conservation. In fact conservationists will carry guns to combat poachers today in the big game parks of South Africa.
Here today we are near a protected area but it is not a park as such and there are none of the iconic or legendary big five, as they are known here in South Africa, only a troop of popular and sometimes mischievous baboons. Left to themselves they will roam around in specific regions, as they are territorial, and they will move through a specific region, as a troop, consisting of one main alpha male along with some females and babies.
As the troop grows, the new young males split off and form other troops or fight for dominance, as is natural in many species. Seeing them here today, the large male only showed himself later, but I saw a female and infants first. They seemed to notice me first, perhaps smelling me from a distance downwind. They did not appear too concerned, though did keep their distance. It took a little while but eventually they did reveal more of themselves and even became quite playful.
I doubt they knew I was filming them but the troop seemed interested in observing me just as much as I was observing them. Obviously I was harmless. Actually they are protected here and one is not really allowed to shoot them or disturb them at all. Unfortunately some farmers are forced to shoot them sometimes in areas where they raid the crops. There may be better ways to treat the problem but that is what the farmers find easiest for now It seems.
On rare occasions the troop will even make their way into the suburb of the town nearby and harass the residents, stealing their fruit or vegetables, assaulting their dogs or wreaking havoc in the gardens, damaging items. Even the trees are damaged, as the baboons appear to lack foresight and appear destructive or thoughtless in their behaviour. It can be really frustrating for local residents, and they complain to the nature conservation authorities but little is done to alleviate the situation.
So the humans are forced to live side by side with their cousins in the animal kingdom. It seems that sometimes the baboons run out of food or perhaps they just like to find easy targets to prey upon. They are not cute and friendly by any means, as much as they may look so in the video clips. I managed to get two small video clips of them as you can see here in today’s presentation. You only get glimpses of the baboons in the first clip but the second clip shows them in more detail. There were more of them, like the big male, but I wasn’t able to get him in the video clip this time unfortunately, though I saw him briefly, just for a moment. He didn’t seem to want to reveal himself too much, though the infants seemed quite happy to be seen and were very playful as you can see in the second clip.
Thanks for taking the time and showing interest in the post here today. My amateur footage is still full or raw primal beauty and shows the glimpse of nature that one may only see in documentaries so it makes for some fascinating footage, captured purely by luck again, of being in the right place at the right time. You can’t plan these kinds of sightings, so it may be a rare moment worth cherishing, of our cousins in the natural order of life on this planet that is home to so many diverse species, with so much more in common, even on a genetic level, that it seems we were meant to be part of a greater family, all the children of Mother Earth.
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