What do baboons do with their time?
Melanie Gosling
May 07 2007 at 04:22PM
There is a perception that baboons at Pringle Bay spend a large part of their time raiding houses and rubbish bins for food, but new research has shown this is not the case.
The baboons spend most of their time foraging away from the urban area, and only a small part of their time raiding bins and houses.
Evelyn Guyett of Oxford Brookes University in the UK, who did the study with the help of the nature conservation department of Overstrand Municipality, followed baboon troops from dawn to dusk at Pringle Bay as they moved from the cliffs where they slept on to the plains below where rapid urbanisation has occurred.
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Guyett and her helpers were usually about five metres from the baboons, but were not always able to be so close as baboons leapt across roofs and walls or crawled through thick vegetation.
Guyett said because of the small sample size, she was unable to make \"absolute conclusions\". \"However, it would appear that the baboons are spending the majority of their time away from human areas, and only venture on or near buildings for less than a third of their time,\" she said.
She also conducted questionnaires with residents to determine their attitudes to and experience of baboons.
Of these, 77 percent had had their houses raided by baboons at some stage. Of these 32 percent had not been raided in the last year and 55 percent had been raided fewer than five times.
Residents said most baboons had come through the door (42 percent), while 33 percent had come through doors and windows, 16 percent through windows only, five percent had broken in and one percent had come through the dog flap.
Many residents did not have baboon-proof bins and kept their rubbish inside. Most respondents (83 percent) had taken some measures to keep baboons out of their houses, such as burglar bars or electric fencing, but burglar bars were effective only if the gaps between bars were smaller than 80mm.
Most said they never fed baboons deliberately, but many said tourists did. During her study, Guyett saw two cars of tourists feeding the baboons in sight of the \"do not feed baboon\" sign. One group was throwing sweets to the baboons.
When asked for suggestions about how the baboons should be managed, 50 percent said more education about baboons was needed, especially for the non-resident holiday-makers who left their rubbish bags outside. The baboons ripped these bags open.
Twenty-two percent suggested a \"multi-pronged\" approach of more education, including leaflets in all rented houses, better waste management, compulsory fencing, keeping food out of sight, culling, food-lots in the mountains and baboon chasers.
