Walking with meerkats

I haven’t slept well and I’m already awake when my alarm goes off at 5am. My clothes are ready and camera bag packed, so by 5.15 I’m in the farmhouse kitchen and looking for breakfast. There’s tea and coffee, fruit and rusks (hard biscuits best dunked before eating). I grab a banana, dip my rusk in some coffee and I’m ready to go. We’ve been assigned to three meerkat groups; I’m with Denise visiting the Lazuli group and we set off to HQ with Mike at about 5.40. He’s only driven the road once, in daylight and in the opposite direction, and he quickly reaches a fork where none us are sure which way to go. Fortunately Simon rescues us and leads us to the farmhouse where we meet our guide, Alice.

We walk out to the burrows where Lazuli group went to bed last night and find the arrow marked in the sand that shows us which burrow they entered. Alice rubs it out and we settle down to wait first for dawn and then for the meerkats to emerge. Her first job will be to weigh them before they set out foraging; she’ll weigh them all 3 hours later than take a break until the afternoon when she’ll visit another group and weigh them before they settle down for the night. This data enables the project to monitor how effectively the meerkats forage and what effect the availability of food has on their behaviour. Other observations are also taken while the researchers wait for weighing; they are all volunteers, mostly post-grads from the UK as the project is overseen by Cambridge University. Alice tells us she comes from Exeter and has been at the project around six months. She’s friendly and happy to chat about her life on the project and beyond; she tells us that they think the dominant female has had pups but they haven’t been seen yet.

Suddenly the first meerkat head pokes out of the burrow and Denise crouches to set her Go Pro to film them emerging. Amazingly a couple of tiny heads appear and Denise beckons me over – the pups are in the mouth of the burrow! Alice rushes to get the hair dye that is used to mark the Meerkats and dabs a little on the four heads she can see. The little ones don’t emerge entirely but we’re privileged to have been present when they first saw the light of day. Bobby-Jo had told us yesterday that she had the same experience when visiting previously; it’s something few people ever get to see.

We wait for a while after the adults leave the burrow, but the pups seem to be staying put. One of the adults remains behind to babysit – in this case, unusually, a young male as the group has no mature females other than the dominant female and adolescents can’t be trusted. Alice weighs each meerkat in turn, tempting them onto the scales with either a morsel of boiled egg or some water from a hamster bottle. Most are cooperative, although the dominant male scent marks the scales constantly with secretions from his anal gland and Alice has to fend him off with her record book. The book contains the weights of the meerkats – and, in this case, the blood of a previous visitor who was bitten by the dominant male.

 The meerkats sun themselves only briefly before scampering off to forage for insects and grubs in the sand. They locate them mainly by smell and then dig for them with their front paws; their eyesight is geared to distance and they have poor close-up vision. We follow and Alice monitors them, making a note of particular behaviours and collecting samples of their faeces. I’ve already worked out that the zookeepers are preoccupied by poo – they were keen to identify a specimen left by the steps to the landing stage at Riverplace Manor – as a result some of the suggested names proposed for our group are Poo Patrol and Scat Attack.

It’s hard to keep track of the meerkats, as the dominant male and dominant female go separate ways and some follow each. They are soon spread over the dry riverbed and beyond. They call out at intervals, so that they can keep track of each other; a more high-pitched, cat-like cry is used when a meerkat can’t immediately locate the others. The weighing is a way to check how successful their foraging has been. It has been dry lately and that makes food more scarce; at times of drought their numbers decline sharply as they reproduce less and pups are less likely to survive.

There are separate projects to study the ground squirrels and tortoises, as well as a programme that studies mole rats for potential insights into cancer and ageing. The dominant meerkats have radio collars attached, so that the researchers can track them, and so do the tortoises that are being studied. We find a large tortoise without a radio box on its back and Alice radios the tortoise researcher with its coordinates. She looks at its rear, as the shape of the back of the shell differs between the sexes, but isn’t sure enough to confirm its gender – that question is settled when the tortoise lays an egg. She hasn’t dug a hole for it and makes no attempt to cover it over before she ambles off. One of the meerkats approaches and I wonder if it will be eaten; it’s disregarded after a few sniffs though.

The tortoise researcher arrives on a quad bike and we go back to watching the meerkats. They are very scattered now and Alice has trouble locating them all for weighing. That task completed she leads us back to the burrow where Denise left her Go Pro in case the pups re-emerged. We’re quite late back as a result and Sue and Ray are already in the combi. Alice admires Sue’s top, which appropriately features an embroidered meerkat, and Sue kindly offers to give it to her. I take Alice’s email address so that I can send her the photos I took while she was weighing the meerkats and Mike drives us back to our farmhouse.  On the way back we disturb a herd of wildebeest. Lunch includes last night’s leftovers plus a delicious frittata, which we name “hakuna frittata” – another potential team name perhaps?

Bobby-Jo had been hoping to see Tim Clutton-Brock while we’re here – he’s the project’s founder and literally wrote the book on meerkat behaviour; it’s called “Flower of the Kalahari” and Ray and I have brought copies with us. Tim makes a surprise visit towards late afternoon, arriving just as it begins to rain heavily; we sit and chat to him in the farmhouse dining room. He’s friendly and unassuming and happy to sign our books and have a photo taken with us all. Unexpectedly he invites us for drinks the following evening at his house in the reserve. Sadly his wife Dafila, whose paintings adorn the farmhouse walls, is ill and hasn’t been able to travel with him this time.

It's time for our evening visit to the meerkats; this time I’m with Sue, Ray and Bobby-Jo visiting a group called Hakuna Matata. They have made their home in a property across the road and Mike drives us to the project HQ where we meet Doug, who takes us to where the meerkats were last seen foraging. The rain had stopped but begins again, more gently this time, and a half-hearted rainbow appears. We interrupt two amorous tortoises; there are four in all and we stop to photograph them against yellow flowers. The rain has stopped and the sky begins to redden as the sun sinks behind the trees.

The meerkats are still foraging, apart from the sentry who has chosen the top of a bush as his vantage point; he takes no notice of us as we photograph him. I take Bobby-Jo’s advice to stay low, and enjoy the novelty of looking up to a meerkat. The light is fading fast and soon I have to abandon my SLR and use my camera phone; the sunset is pretty spectacular. One by one the meerkats enter the burrow, then we walk back to the reserve and get ready for dinner - Mike has cooked a spaghetti Bolognese. After dinner, Bobby-Jo sets up her camera to demonstrate night photography, using Denise’s rondavel as the foreground for a photo of the milky way. Lightning is still flickering and we can hear the distant rumble of thunder.