On Wildlife

On Saturday I went with a group of friends down to Simon’s Town, which is on the coast on the Indian Ocean side of things. The thing about swimming here is that you have to be careful about great white sharks—during our first week in Cape Town a man was actually killed by one at a beach we had been to only two days before. Apparently there’s a flag system that will tell you if there’s been shark sightings or if the water is too murky to tell, but since we couldn’t find any flags at Long Beach on Saturday, we decided to test our luck and wade in anyway. One of the girls we went with was absolutely convinced she had seen a fin in the water, but we told ourselves it was a duck and got in, got out with zero shark attacks.

It was when we were packing up to leave a few hours later that rest of the people on the beach got visibly riled up and were chattering and pointing at the water. Right where we had been there were two fins dipping in and out of the waves—not sharks, but dolphins! They must have been only four feet into the surf, right in front of where we had been camped out. It was incredible.

So, in honor of my first wild dolphin citing, this post is dedicated to all those animals that we’ve encountered up close and personal. Come April, when we head to the Eastern Cape, this list will probably be a bit more exciting. But humor me anyway.

-Squirrels. You laugh, but squirrels are a big deal here. We were walking through a park in downtown Cape Town and all of our South African friends were extremely proud to showcase the imported gray squirrels they have there. And I suppose that if I had to be a squirrel anywhere in the world, it would be Cape Town, where they’re extremely well-fed, fawned over, and greatly admired by the local populace. But I still don’t quite see the appeal.

-Seals. We came across three or four of these guys when we were in Kalk Bay the first weekend, hanging around the fish sellers and hoping for whatever scrumptious gutty bits might get thrown their way. These are actually the reason that there are great white sharks lurking off the Cape. And I mean no personal disrespect, but they’re also probably the nastiest-smelling creatures on God’s green earth.

-Baboons. When we went to Cape Point for the day a few weeks ago, our lecturer gave us the run-down of human-baboon interaction. Unlike city pigeons, baboons get more aggressive whenever they’re fed by tourists, to the point where they’ve started posting signs advising people to drive with their windows rolled up and their doors locked to keep baboons out of cars. Apparently if a baboon comes at you while you’re eating, you’re supposed to chuck your lunch at it and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.

Incidentally, we met a couple (read: nine or ten) while we were finishing up lunch. They circled up around us pretty fast and edged us off our picnic site so they could go around picking up bits of cheese and lettuce that we had dropped. We were all scrambling to take pictures and to hide the rest of our food and stay out of the way, and it was all pretty much fun and games until the alpha male arrived (have you ever seen a full-grown baboon? They’re not small. By any means.) That was the point at which our director, cognizant of the twelve naïve American lives she had in her hands, shepherded us back onto the bus and out of there.

-Penguins. There’s a colony of them below Simon’s Town and the sheer number of them there, just sunning in the sand and nesting in the grasses, is absolutely insane. We probably spent a good forty-five minutes just watching them waddle back and forth across the rocks. The best penguin moment of the trip thus far, though, was when we were at Robben Island. We were crowded onto a huge tour bus with about fifty other tourists, and the tour guide was in the middle of a pretty serious explanation about the island’s first political prisoners when he suddenly stopped. All seventy-five of us watched a penguin wander out of the brush on one side of the road, hobble across the blacktop in front of us, and meander slowly into the grasses on the other side. Then we all snapped out of it and the tour guide picked up right where he left off.

-Dassies. I really have no idea what this thing is. Our director told us it’s closely related to the elephant but my host sister Ode keeps on poking fun at my extreme gullibility so I’m trying my hardest not to believe it. All I really know about them is that they look like cat-sized hamsters, they make a lot of noise, and I nearly squashed one at Cape of Good Hope when it chased its buddy right in front of my feet.

-Lizards. We saw a handful of these guys at Cape Point and then scads more on top of Table Mountain the next week. There’s also an inch-long, less scaly household variety that’s been popping up recently. I spent about five minutes trying to coax one out of the window above my bed last night when it made a nose-dive straight into my bedcovers. I haven’t seen it since, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

-Ferocious Man-Eating Poodles. Piwi sleeps on the foot of my bed sometimes.

Honorable Mentions and Far-Off Sightings

-Ostrich

-Springbok

-Dolphin

-Egyptian Ibis