Karoo Keepsakes — Racehorse Legends, Dashing Dassies, Dancing Cranes, Sock Puppets and the Manners of Meerkats

Karoo Keepsakes II by Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit.

By Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit

11 Jul 2024

Why horse traditions and the Era of the Ostrich have returned to the Karoo, why blue cranes love to dance (or dance to love), and why meerkats are among the most altruistic mammals on Earth.

Horse country

When the Kimberley diamond rush started back in 1871, one arrived there either by horse or by ox. It was still a rail-less, road-free era.

The quickest way to the diamond fields was via ship to Port Elizabeth. From there, you made your cumbersome way across the Great Karoo, enjoying the sights and sounds of places like Cradock, Middelburg, Graaff-Reinet and Colesberg at your leisure. Each hard day’s ride would get you another 75km closer to the diamond pits of Kimberley. Each night you stabled your horses, drank a pint at a hostelry and collapsed into a rough bed.

Soon there was a good living to be made in the Karoo, breeding the draught horses, carriage horses and riding horses needed by the endless stream of traffic headed north. The trekboers who had spent a nomadic life on horseback in the Karoo were already some of the most outstanding riders in the world.

Horses thrive in this semi-desert. The high altitude, low rainfall and frosty winter weather resemble the Gobi desert, where they first evolved. Also, the soils and water are remarkably high in trace minerals, especially calcium, which are excellent for bone formation.

Charles Southey of Culmstock near Middelburg was the first man to bring thoroughbreds into South Africa. They arrived from England by ship, had to swim to shore, and then were walked 400km to his farm.

The Anglo-Boer War and its aftermath nearly killed off the stud farms of the Karoo. But the horse traditions have returned, and the Karoo now hosts many shows and endurance rides that celebrate man and his mount.

Taking the hyrax

They call him the Bite-Sized Bear, because he’s compact and good eating, especially if you’re an eagle looking for fly-away food up in the mountains.

That’s the dassie, or rock hyrax, that plump fellow with the overbite and the constantly outraged look. Dassies are great raptor snacks, all bite-sized and ready to eat.

In southern Africa, the Verreaux’s eagle has had a long evolutionary duel with the furry little rock dweller, a daily drama best appreciated along the Little Karoo’s folded mountains.

To bypass the dassies’ implacable vigilance, eagles attack like fighter jets, using the glare of the sun as cover. Or they did until dassies counter-evolved a unique lens in their retinas that allowed them to look directly at the sun. So the eagles upped their game and began to hunt in pairs – one distracts, the other attacks.

The hyrax then changed its routine, keeping to short-range foraging excursions. If it’s no further than 12m from cover, the dassie can squeak to safety in under three seconds – just less than the time it takes an eagle to dive from 150m up.

Dassies are creatures of habit and prefer to wee in the same spot every day. In many places in the Karoo, thousands of years of sticky dassiepis have hardened to a black tarry substance some call rocksweat. The old farmers used it as a traditional remedy for everything from hypochondria to kidney ailments and influenza. Modern society uses it as a perfume fixative.

Karoo dassie A dassie on the lip of the Augrabies Gorge, keeping an eye out for eagles. (Photo: Chris Marais)

Born to dance

He starts by running in circles, his long tail feathers trailing. She leaves the flock and joins him, her eyes large and dark, her feathers glistening silver-blue in the Karoo sun. First, she chases after him, then he pursues her.

After that, her lovesick swain might tenderly bend his long neck to pick up a few strands of grass, a twig of Karoo bush, or perhaps a fragment of dried donkey dung.

He flings his Karoo corsage into the air. She sometimes catches it neatly in her beak, or she picks her own, and they toss them up at the same time. They call out together, heads thrown back and beaks pointed at the sky, a cry that sounds like the guttural lovesong of a teddy bear. They bow, they pirouette, they leap high into the air like winged Russian ballerinas. And they carry on dancing like this for hours. Every day for two weeks they dance together. Only then will they consummate this beautiful courtship, and stay together for life.

Blue crane numbers have dropped dramatically in the past few decades, but the grassy eastern Karoo remains one of its strongholds.

In winter, the graceful long-legged cranes roost together at night in large groups, a few dozen or hundred strong. By day they’ll split up to find food, dining on seeds, grasses, spilled grain, insects, and even lizards and mice.

Right through the year, they’ll break into dance at odd intervals. Even the singletons dance, sometimes for fun, sometimes to release tension. But in the spring, the romance and the Dance of the Karoo Corsage will begin again.

Karoo blue crane Blue cranes in evening flight over the Sneeuberg. (Photo: Chris Marais)

Karoo sock puppets

As you drive sedately through the Karoo on a sunny day, don’t be surprised to find a large and rather obsessed bird-keeping pace beside you. That’s Struthio camelus, the ostrich, probably male, with tell-tale pink legs and an eye for the ladies in season.

This guy was once the golden bird of the Karoo, and his best feathers fetched fortunes on the world market as everyone with an eye for fashion just had to wear those showy plumes.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Karoo oddities – tales from the quirky, magical heartland of South Africa

In the early 1900s, a single perfect feather would get you enough money to buy a ticket on a cruising ship from Cape Town to Europe. The industry went white-hot when word filtered down to Oudtshoorn of a Super Ostrich: the Barbary of the south Sahara.

A man called Russell Thornton was given a top-secret mission by the South African government – to find and bring back breeding stock of these fabulous creatures. What followed was vintage Hollywood: spies, secret meetings and a desert march to Timbuktu and beyond. Eventually, they found the elusive Barbaries, captured 156 of them, and frog-marched them in giant baskets to a ship moored in Lagos Harbour.

Fortunes were made off ostrich feathers. Palaces were built. For years it looked like the good times would never end. Then World War 1 broke out, and no one had time for feathered fripperies.

But the Era of the Ostrich has returned. The market has gone mad again – this time for its leather, its lean meat and its feathers.

Karoo ostrich In the early 1900s, a single perfect feather would get you a small fortune. (Photo: Chris Marais)

Meerkat manners

Meerkats are a bit like movie stars. They’re camera-friendly and always so much smaller than you’d expect. They also seem to have perfected the “thousand-yard stare” you see in the eyes of Hollywood’s leading men.

But they’re not acting. That cute little “meerkat on a mound” image we all have from 100 TV shows means the little animal is just taking care of business. The meerkat you see is actually the designated lookout, keeping a beady eye on the sky for raptors on the down-swoop.

And snakes – they hate them with a passion. Some say the fact that meerkats eat lots of scorpions and spiders gives them an in-built resistance to poisons. If a meerkat is bitten by a venomous snake, chances are he’ll lie there motionless for some time, as if he were in a coma. But then, little by little, twitch by twitch, he comes around again.

Karoo meerkat A meerkat on lookout duty emits a periodic soothing peep researchers call the 'watchman’s song'. (Photo: Chris Marais)

The meerkat on lookout duty always seeks a good vantage point – a tree stump or stone – and emits a periodic soothing peep to let the others know all is well. Researchers call it the “watchman’s song”. Sometimes, human researchers studying a habituated colony might be the only tall objects available, so the lookouts often shimmy up and sit sentry on their shoulders.

But now we get to the difference between Hollywood stars and meerkats. Animal behaviourists say they are among the most altruistic and cooperative mammals on Earth. Each member of a meerkat family willingly puts its life and well-being on the line for another – a true icon of humanity. DM

Karoo Keepsakes by Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit.

Karoo Keepsakes II by Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit.

These are extracts from Karoo Keepsakes I & II by Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit. The authors are offering a Keepsakes Special on the classic little coffee table books of R600 (including courier costs within South Africa). For enquiries, please e-mail Julie at [email protected]

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Maverick Life

Horse country

Taking the hyrax

Born to dance

Karoo sock puppets

Meerkat manners