Karoo creature cameos – the captivating world of the small, wild and wonderful

Testing the wind – a jackal prepares for an evening hunt. (Photo: Chris Marais)

30 Oct 2024

The small beasties of the Karoo may be less than thigh high, but they are quirky, mostly charming and true survivors of the drylands.

As the stars fade in the fey pre-dawn light, a group of humans from all over the world sit expectantly in a semicircle of deck chairs around a hole in the ground. As the sun rises over a low hill and lights the edge of it, a meerkat pops up, quick and upright as an exclamation mark.

She stands on her hind legs and scans the silent people, judging them as something less than a threat. Her dark belly exposed to the sun, she leans back on her tail and lets out a barely audible chirrup. The next one to emerge is a half-grown youngster. He immediately ranges himself beside her, belly to the sun. Up comes another, and another, and another. Soon there are well over a dozen, all standing like skittles, warming themselves in the dawn light.

Their dark eyes gleam as they scan the veld, uttering small chittering comments. They look up and around and to the sides, always returning to gaze at the humans.

These particular meerkats are habituated to humans, so they don’t sprint off or duck back down a burrow.

A crow flies overhead and all the meerkats swivel their heads to peer at it nervously. Suricates must learn to run for their lives from a very young age. Meerkats are preyed upon by eagles, snakes, mongooses, lynx, and jackals. They always have a sentinel on duty for early warning.

In turn, meerkats eat other snakes, mice, lizards, crunchy beetles and scorpions. Now warm enough to hunt, they head off. Little puffs of dust rise into the air as they scrabble in the dirt, then move on.

These shy but undoubted stars of small life in the desert have even had their own documentary soap opera – Meerkat Manor. They’re like humans would like to be – tough yet kind, clever, loyal and alert, altruistic to a startling degree. But just temperamental and ornery enough to be soapie stars, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MULA1ktrqyg

Ground squirrel games

The Karoo and the Kalahari are home to very large animals like the eland, gemsbok and kudu.

But the grass tussocks and Karoo bossies are also the perfect habitat for meerkats, ground squirrels and yellow mongooses, among the most numerous of the weasel-sized arid life forms.

Read more: Birds, mice, snakes and baboons – Creatures who treat your house as theirs

Ground squirrels, those cinnamon-coloured rodents with creamy racing stripes, are particularly easy to see at rest camps in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and the Ubejane Loop through the Mountain Zebra National Park. They are inquisitive and confiding, able to forage in the noonday sun thanks to their fluffy parasol tails, and happy to share their daily rituals with park visitors wielding cameras and binoculars.

They search for seeds, tubers and the odd termite. In high summer, they lie sprawled like tiny tiger mats in the shade to cool down.

Low-level critters like this ground squirrel thrive in the Karoo and Kalahari. (Photo: Chris Marais)

Ground squirrels often share a warren of tunnels with yellow mongooses, their white-tipped tails the best way of identifying them. Although they like to forage in the veld alone, they come back every night to sociable colonies of up to a dozen.

Yellow mongooses are consummate burrowers, digging massive estates with as many as 60 tunnels leading to chambers 1.5 metres below the ground.

But they’re just as happy to cohabit. Meerkats are their other favoured den companions.

The humble hedgehog

Few people ever see a hedgehog in the wild. This spiny little beast is usually out after dusk and prefers the dry Karoo, Kalahari and open savannahs.

It eats beetles, termites, slugs, bird eggs, grasshoppers, and fungi and is quite solitary. In fact, when one hedgehog encounters another, some growling, snorting and head-butting usually ensues.

A hedgehog will usually potter about slowly while it forages, but it can step on the gas and scuttle away if threatened. If that doesn’t work, it immediately curls into a spiny little ball, which deters most predators, including lions. Somehow the giant eagle owl is more adept at handling it, and hedgehogs are their preferred prey.

A hedgehog also sleeps curled up and seems to be able to drop its breathing rate at will, going into a drowsy torpor to wait out the cold or the lean times.

Even as a baby, it is a formidable little thing. Within three hours of birth, the blind and deaf baby hedgehog’s first spines poke through the skin. First come the white ones, then the pigmented ones. By the end of seven days, it is unmistakably a hedgehog.

Hedgehog at sunset in the Karoo – a very lucky sighting. (Photo: Chris Marais)

Not much more is known about this odd little animal, except that it can give a hair-raising screech. Although it seems perfect as a study subject, not many have really paid it attention, and it’s difficult to raise in captivity because hedgehog mothers have a dismaying tendency to mistake their babies for food.

A time of tortoises

About 300 million years ago, tortoises were all set to become the defining life form on Earth. Just as there would later be an Age of Dinosaurs, an earlier Age of Tortoises seemed inevitable.

This was during the Late Carboniferous era, an extraordinary time of very large things, thanks to all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Insects had the wingspans of birds. Plants grew huge.

The creatures that ate the outsize plants were also massive. One, the Pareiasaur, was the size of a VW Beetle. Also known as the Bradysaurus, it is suspected of having exceptionally bad digestion thanks to its inefficient beaky teeth. It was one of the ancestral tortoises.

The oldest tortoise fossils in the world are found in the Karoo, home to far more other species than anywhere else. Clearly, they evolved here.

Spring is here, and lusty Karoo tortoises are on the move. (Photo: Chris Marais)

Alas, the climate slowly changed from moist and warm to cool and arid. It didn’t suit their kind.

The Karoo is still home to five tortoise species, a greater concentration than any other place in the world, though.

In spring they awaken from their winter hibernation and stumble about, seeking mates and food, in roughly that order. The males develop a tendency to charge at one another. It’s like a bullfight in slow motion.

In early summer they delight in immersing themselves for long hours in puddles and dams, gazing about them imperiously, like Roman senators in a Pompeii bathhouse. In autumn they’re always eating and by the time the first frosts come, they’re tucked away under north-facing bushes, deep in winter sleep.

A sneak of jackals

All the best animal folk stories in Europe and Africa involve the fox and the jackal – two very similar animals. So much so that the collective noun for both is “a sneak”.

They are renowned for their cunning, which has been refined during the long feuds they have fought with small livestock farmers.

In the Karoo, a similar battle has been going on for generations. It’s like an arms race.

For the farmers, the most effective method so far is for hunters to go out late at night with strange varmint-luring whistles and high-powered rifles with silencers. The silencers are so as not to alert other jackals.

Testing the wind – a jackal prepares for an evening hunt. (Photo: Chris Marais)

But these tricksy jackals learn quickly from their own mistakes and those of others. They also teach their pups what to avoid, so survival strategies are being refined all the time.

Perversely, persecution actually seems to boost their numbers, because many jackals take the place of a single killed alpha male. Killing them has fast-tracked jackal evolution. The slow and unwary are dead.

Like humans and crows, jackals can switch prey. If there are no springbok or sheep lambs, they’ll eat berries, carrion, lizards, eggs, beetles or mice. They live on the edge, watchful and opportunistic.

Small livestock farmers may loathe them, but jackals have exemplary domestic habits. There is complete equality between male and female. They do everything together and, incidentally, mate for life. The young adults in the family help raise the next litter, showing all the devotion of true parents. DM

For more stories on the Karoo from Julienne du Toit and Chris Marais, try their Karoo Roads series of books, priced at R350 (landed) each.

The Karoo Quartet Special (Karoo Roads 1 – 4) consists of more than 60 Karoo stories and hundreds of black and white photographs. Priced at R960 (including taxes and courier in South Africa), this Heritage Collection can be ordered from [email protected]

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South Africa

Ground squirrel games

The humble hedgehog

A time of tortoises

A sneak of jackals