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From beaches to baboons, Shark Spotters brings holistic approach to human-wildlife conflict management

A baboon on a hill in Simon’s Town. (Photo: EPA / Nic Bothma)

25 Apr 2025

For more than two decades, Shark Spotters has watched Cape Town’s ocean from above. Now, Shark Spotters, led by Sarah Waries, is looking to the mountains and suburbs of the southern Peninsula as it leads a new holistic approach to managing some of the city’s most controversial residents — baboons.

Shark Spotters is known for its work in reducing the risk of shark attacks by monitoring shark activity and preventing the spatial overlap of sharks and water users at popular beaches. In March 2025, it joined SANParks, CapeNature, and the City of Cape Town in the Cape Peninsula Baboon Management Joint Task Team (task team).

Sarah Waries, CEO of Shark Spotters, a pioneering shark safety and research nonprofit organisation that has now taken over some duties to manage baboon management in the Cape Peninsula. (Photo: Kristin Engel)

The task team is now leading baboon management in the Cape Peninsula, where human-baboon conflict is perhaps one of the most controversial and politically charged issues, with more and more human-wildlife conflicts occurring.

In April alone, two baboons were shot in Simon’s Town. At the root of the increasing conflict is that as the city grows, development is increasingly encroaching on the baboon habitat, pushing baboons into residential areas in search of food, bringing them into conflict with humans. On top of this, the baboon population is increasing.

Read more: Tensions rise in Constantia as man arrested for threatening baboon monitors with firearm

Sarah Waries, Shark Spotters CEO, sat down for an interview with Daily Maverick to unpack their approach to baboon management.

Shark Spotters is a pioneering shark safety and research nonprofit organisation that has proactively reduced interactions and conflict between recreational water users and white sharks. (Photo: Kristin Engel)

“It seems a bit weird to think of Shark Spotters doing baboon management. But essentially, it’s human wildlife conflict. And we’ve done human-wildlife conflict since 2004 (working with the city as a partner since 2006).

From sharks to baboons — and people

Shark Spotters is bringing a more holistic approach to baboon management, and Waries explains that it was this ethos that has made the Shark Spotters programme so effective: “It’s applicable to any kind of human-wildlife conflict.”

Waries said that they couldn’t look at the matter from just one perspective; it required a multifaceted understanding of the animals and the people involved, to educate communities, and to try to conserve and protect the wildlife.

She said that while human-shark interactions were rare, they were highly traumatic, with just one incident having far-reaching consequences.

In contrast, conflicts involving baboons were more persistent and cumulative, involving continuous, but smaller incidents. Despite their differences, both types of conflict were significant in their own ways.

baboons Baboons are guided off the road near Cape Point on 24 October 2012. (Photo: Gallo Images / Nardus Engelbrecht)

“[Baboons] are probably the most contentious human-wildlife issue that we have in the Western Cape … I would say, in the whole of South Africa,” Waries said.

This was because people were dealing daily with wildlife coming into the urban area, resulting in conflicts. Waries said that this was when they spoke to the city and the task team, which had also been examining all the solutions.

“Human-wildlife conflict is unpredictable, it’s changing all the time, it’s dynamic,” Waries said, thus any management body needed to be able to respond to incidents with flexibility.

Because teams were restricted to contracts, service providers were unable to change their activities or their area of focus, and the client (the city) couldn’t change the conditions of the contract.

“It’s very rigid and then you get very stuck because you can’t respond to situations,” Waries explained.

How Shark Spotters was doing things differently was that instead of going through a tender process, it had essentially expanded its existing human-wildlife conflict management partnership with the city through a Memorandum of Understanding.

With that, Waries said the conditions allowed for the flexibility and adaptability needed to try to manage a dynamic situation, and better allocate resources.

Shark Spotters has taken over some operational responsibilities in the Cape Peninsula Baboon Management Joint Task Team. Above is the Shark Spotters information centre in Muizenberg, Cape Town. (Photo: Kristin Engel)

The City of Cape Town's Coastal Management Department and Shark Spotters share an administrative office in Muizenberg, Cape Town. (Photo: Kristin Engel)

When asked if Shark Spotters had taken on the previous contractors, Waries said, “We’ve taken over every single employee who was working for NCC, the previous contractor, and we brought them all over with the same or better conditions.”

Waries said the rangers now had slightly better working conditions, and they had tried to improve as much as they could within the restrictions they were given. They had also increased the number of rangers on each troop.

Holistic approach to baboon management

Waries said the strategy they had been implementing was the Cape Peninsula Baboon Strategic Management Plan, the result of the collective effort of the members of the task team.

The joint task team — SANParks, the , and CapeNature – developed the strategic management plan, but Waries said its implementation had been difficult, and that the only thing that had been used from it so far was the ranger programme.

There were many other aspects to the strategic management plan that never progressed past discussion and acknowledgement that it should be implemented. Shark Spotters hoped to implement the plan more effectively and holistically.

“Essentially, most of what our approach is, is to take the strategic management plan and start implementing the additional bits. The ranger programme is the foundation of everything… we’ll always need the boots on the ground,” said Waries.

Read more: Cape Peninsula baboons — outdated management framework persists despite legal mandate

Waries said the idea was to then build on that with strategic fencing, tracking animals, seeing where they move, and trying to understand those strategies.

baboon mother A baby baboon and mother in Kommetjie, Cape Town. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Nic Bothma)

For example, Waries said the northern population of baboons had seen a lot of population growth. One aspect under investigation was the feasibility of contraception and sterilisation to see if that would help control numbers in the urban area.

“It’s very interesting, because you’ve got the north, which is a growing population, and it’s growing quite rapidly. And then the south, where the numbers aren’t growing very much at all, but you also have high levels of conflict in places like Simon’s Town and Kommetjie. It’s very nuanced.

“Each area and each troop has very different, specific challenges. It’s trying to look at those and work with communities, with affected residents and landowners and authorities,” Waries said.

In the past three-and-a-half months, Waries said they had gone much further in carrying out feasibility studies and actioning the strategic plan holistically.

“We’re trying to move fast on that, because we know that there just isn’t the tolerance for the kind of high levels of conflict that there have been.

“To see baboons being shot on a weekly basis now, shows a failure on our part. And I don’t mean ours as the task team [alone], I mean, ours as people in general, that like we have led to this situation where people feel they can take the law into their own hands.

“Baboons are being shot regularly,” said Waries.

She said this was between the authorities, the communities and everyone involved, because the situation had not previously been properly addressed.

Shark Spotters spent the first two months of their new role, all day every day, in stakeholder engagement meetings with anybody who contacted them, as well as the people they knew were involved.

“A lot of it was that people just needed somebody to listen, because no one had really listened over the years, because of the many challenges. So it doesn’t matter if you’re the person who would strap yourself to a tree to save a baboon, or you’re the person who would shoot at the baboon… we will hear everybody’s perspectives and try and find the consensus somewhere in the middle,” said Waries.

Chacma Baboon Simon’s Town A baboon on a hill in Simon’s Town. (Photo: EPA / Nic Bothma)

In terms of the deliverables, Shark Spotters hopes to keep baboons from urban areas by using the ranger programme to prolong the time they spend away from those areas, while implementing other parts of the strategic baboon management plan.

Shark Spotters now manages 12 baboon troops across the southern and northern parts of the Cape Peninsula, with each troop and area posing its own challenges, depending on how accessible the attractants are.

“Baboons are clever and they are strategising… They’ve fooled me on many occasions, in my house. They’re incredibly clever and they’re not predictable,” said Waries.

Waries reflected on a recent experience where the team kept baboons out of Simon’s Town for about nine days, leading the team to think it finally had a winning strategy.

But then, on a misty morning, the baboons knew exactly what to do.

“They used the mist as cover and they broke back down into town because, of course, the rangers couldn’t see where they all were,” said Waries.

Waries said the rangers had years of experience and knew that if the baboons got past a certain point in each area, they would struggle to manage them and prevent conflicts. So while trying to stop them from going past that point, the baboons sometimes sneaked around and moved past somewhere else.

So, constant strategic planning and management were needed in each area for each troop.

Welfare of baboons and people

Waries added that they had to move away from dealing with this kind of human-wildlife conflict in isolation.

This was especially because, at the moment, welfare outcomes for baboons were “atrocious” when they spent so much time in urban areas.

“We’ve got a couple of baboons and some of the troops that spend a lot of time in urban areas that have a lot of hair loss, and we’re trying to investigate exactly what it is that’s causing this hair loss,” said Waries.

Then there was also the impact on community welfare due to the stress and frustration of the situation.

Read more: Baboons and human fear – a deep history behind the cruel attacks in South Africa

“You get very opposing, polarised camps within the baboon sphere. People who love baboons and people who hate baboons,” Waries said.

Managing and finding balance between these factions was among the issues, Waries said, that they had discussed at length with the city.

“We all know it’s not good for baboons to be in urban areas. Whether you are a baboon lover or a baboon hater, everybody agrees that it’s not good for baboons or people for them to be in urban areas,” Waries said, adding that this was one consensus they could work with.

What they were focused on was managing baboons and people.

“People must recognise that they live in an area that was a natural baboon habitat. So there’s a likelihood that there will be baboons in the area. But also, we need to realise that baboons going into people’s dustbins, houses, etc, is not sustainable. So we need to manage them in the urban area… It’s the same for any wildlife,” said Waries.

Read more: Why try to undermine a court order that can benefit baboons and communities?

Waries reiterated that baboons were very intelligent. There are many other animals involved in human-wildlife conflict on the urban edge, but baboons in particular triggered quite strong responses.

On their experience so far, Waries said it had been a big learning curve, but they had managed to retain all the staff who had been dealing with the baboon issue before, plus the contribution of the Shark Spotters’ differing experience and expertise.

“I can’t promise that baboons are never going to come to urban areas again. But if we can reduce it to tolerable amounts, then it’s more well-managed,” said Waries. DM

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South Africa

From sharks to baboons — and people

Holistic approach to baboon management

Welfare of baboons and people