Baboons get the hang of Cape’s paintball drill
Bin raiders behave as nonlethal strategy bears fruit
BABOON troops that have raided homes and intimidated tourists for years on the Cape Peninsula now spend almost 98% of their time in the mountains, with only a handful of rebels breaking through the human chain of field rangers to raid gardens and houses.
Human-wildlife conflict is increasingly common and Cape Town’s success in reducing clashes is exceptional, according to experts in the field.
Human attacks on baboons have dropped by 55% in recent years, and the baboon technical team led by the City of Cape Town deserved congratulations for ensuring a sustainable primate population, said Professor Justin O’Riain, director of the Institute for Communities and Wildlife in Africa at the University of Cape Town.
Julia Wood, Cape Town’s manager of biodiversity, said its baboon strategy had had a dramatic impact in the past five years.
Now field rangers are equipped with paintball guns and other tools to chase baboons from the urban edge. The city spends about R10-million a year on baboon management, paying the salaries of 80 field rangers and improving refuse management.
“The strategy has achieved the impossible,” said Wood.
“When we took on this project the [baboon] population was declining and now it is growing, and there are far fewer run-ins between people and baboons. We get far more support from residents than we get complaints.”
On a rainy morning last week, COLLARED: Ranger Oswald Bhodloza scans for a signal from a baboon’s GPS tracking device as the whistling and shouting rangers herded more than 25 members of the Da Gama Park troop from the streets onto the mountain slopes, it was clear the baboons knew the drill.
The neon-vested rangers were patrolling the streets before sunrise to make sure the troop — the only one of 11 on the Cape Peninsula allowed to sleep on the edge of town — moved out early.
The consistent dress and behaviour of the field rangers mean the baboons usually start moving when they see the men arrive.
An abundance of infants and juveniles scampered along the roads while the adults strolled into the fynbos, where they started to groom each other and chew on roots. Along the way some opportunists toppled a bin or two to look for snacks.
Da Gama Park, on the outskirts of Simon’s Town, is among the areas whose poor refuse management encourages baboons to become habitual raiders, said the institute’s Esme Beamish.
But it is no longer common to find whole troops trashing villages OPPORTUNIST: Unsecured or overflowing rubbish bins attract baboons in Da Gama Park in a free-for-all.
Scientist Gaelle Fehlmann, from Swansea University’s College of Science in Wales, wrote in a recent publication: “Overall, our results suggest that baboon troops in Cape Town balance the foraging rewards gained from raiding against the risk of field ranger (or other human) conflict.
“This suggests that current management strategies do impact baboons’ behaviour and successfully prevent them from frequenting urban spaces.”
The rangers do not routinely fire the paintball guns, but use them on recalcitrant males when needed.
In exceptional cases, habitual raiders do not respond to these nonlethal deterrents. These animals are put down under a protocol approved by the technical team, which includes the National Council of SPCAs.
However, baboon rights activist Jenni Trethowan said the paintball guns had created a landscape of fear, incentivising baboons to conduct raids more swiftly.
She believes the focus should be on preventing access to human food, and is opposed to the killing of adult males. She said this approach had decimated some troops.
But Beamish, who studies population dynamics on the peninsula, said that overall the population had grown consistently from 2006 to 2016.
The euthanasia of habitual raiders limited the possibility of them teaching bad habits to juveniles and improved the public’s tolerance for baboons, said O’Riain. But the goal was zero baboon deaths.
The killing of seasoned raiders was initially high, following poor management before 2012, he said. By 2016 these deaths had halved, suggesting most baboons were responding well to nonlethal management.
Scientific papers published recently in the journals Animal Conservation and BioMed Central show the baboons cleverly adapt to tactics aimed at controlling them.
“The baboons seemed able to pick up on indecision, and the research shows they exploit and hit hardest where the rangers had differences of opinion,” O’Riain said. “The whole life of baboons is about the interpretation of movement and they can read gait and demeanour.”
And thanks to 10 hi-tech experimental collars, researchers can track the baboons and are able to recognise “over 90% of behaviours without actually seeing the baboon”.
There are far fewer run-ins between people and baboons
Comment on this: write to tellus@sundaytimes.co.za or SMS us at 33971 www.sundaytimes.co.za