BOOK EXCERPT: Birds, mice, snakes and baboons – Creatures who treat your house as theirs

Very little beats the sight and sound of fish eagles hunting down by the river, herons flying overhead, or hearing the bark of a baboon in the distant krantzes.

But sometimes the wildlife seems a little too keen on sharing your house and your food with you. 

During our years in Cradock, I’ve handled skinks and lizards, wasps, gigantic rain spiders, umpteen birds (mostly those inquisitive Cape Robin-Chats), a Karoo toad, too many grasshoppers and crickets to mention, and a rather special country-cousin of the cockroach called a boskakkerlak that appears in spring.

I’ve witnessed the translocation of snakes and have freed a young fallow deer tangled in a wire snare (quick hint: gently blindfolding a panicked animal with a shirt or handy fabric over the head calms it down).

Birds around your house

If a bird enters your house, the easiest way to get it out is to open as many outside doors and windows as possible, and close all interior doors. Then calmly herd it towards one of the openings. It will soon flutter out, to the great relief of all concerned.

However, my home-beast management really began back in Joburg.

I once had the extraordinary experience of trying to finesse the exit of a rather silly Grey Go-Away Bird, formerly known as the Grey Lourie. It wouldn’t move from the curtain rail above the window. Eventually, muttering soothing nonsense words, I held up a broom. The invader graciously stepped onto it. Then I carefully lowered the broom to the open window and the bird flew out as if it had all been rehearsed. I’m not sure this would work every time, but it might be worth trying if all else fails.

Indoor bats

Bats are more unnerving, especially because they appear at night time and they swoop around the house as if guided by invisible wires. 

The best way to deal with them is to close all interior doors and to open wide the windows or exterior door if there is one – just as you would with birds.

Then, turn off all the lights inside and switch on a light outside to hopefully attract fluttering moths and other bedazzled goggas. The bat’s incredible echo-location system will soon detect them and it will swoop outside. 

Of course, uninvited guest-beasts are not just a South African platteland thing. We once came across a resort in Tasmania that had a possum problem. The manager told us he had recently been called out by guests to deal with an animal invasion in their cabin. He went over, peered in the window and was met with the unforgettable sight of a family of portly possums sitting companionably in front of a flickering television screen, sharing handfuls of Milo from an opened tin.

Read more: Curious Karoo critters

Simian solutions

Baboons are far less considerate and polite. In many small coastal towns, they are even regarded as creatures of infamy. They know how to open windows and doors. They often work in teams, one hanging from the door handle and the other pushing it. When confronted with sliding doors, baboons simply lift them off the rails and place them gently against a wall. They’ve clearly learnt that shattered glass means cut feet. Once in, they raid fridges, freezers and ovens with ease.

Generally speaking, it’s not regular troop members or the alpha males that indulge in this kind of aberrant behaviour. It is the transient males; the restless “teenage” ones that act like, well, restless teenagers. 

Freya Stennett (who started Ticklemouse Biscuits in Pringle Bay) remembers packing rusks with her family in an intimate, chatty production line around a table. One person was cutting, one was packing, and another was labelling. Her husband kept passing the packages of rusks to his left. Freya looked up to see a huge baboon sitting quietly next to her husband, taking a parcel from him, peeling off a rusk to stuff in his mouth, and dropping the rest onto a growing pile nearby. 

Other encounters are less cute.

“Sometimes we feel like prisoners in our own homes. I came in once after they had plundered my house. They’d checked my oven and my deep freeze, they’d turned everything upside down – my jewellery, my ornaments, my clothes. They were all over the place.

“I once found a very skinny baboon eating bananas in the biscuit kitchen,” added Freya. 

“Every time I took a step towards him, he growled at me. So I had to watch while he chomped down seven kilograms of my bananas, which had been destined for the biscuit mix.”

Prevention is better than cure when it comes to monkeys and baboons. 

Jenni Trethowan, a baboon specialist in Cape Town, confirms that all baboon invader problems start with food. Leaving windows or doors open and a fruit bowl in full view is just asking for trouble. Even pet food, rubbish bags, vegetable gardens and fruit trees will attract them.

If baboons are in your house, try to get them out as fast as possible. Remain calm and keep children and pets out of the way – the baboons will be nervous, and as a result, possibly aggressive. Close internal doors and leave a clear path open to the way they came in. Don’t try to wrestle them for what they have taken.

Once gone, institute measures to make sure they don’t return because they will if they know you have food and they can get in.

Rodents

Periodically, a hungry country mouse (streepmuis) may wander into your house and fall with unconcealed delight upon leftover pellets of dog food. But they are irregular invaders. 

Don’t do as I do and pick up the cute and bewildered rodent, frozen in fear, with your bare hands. You may receive a sharp nip on the finger and then a tetanus shot.

It’s the house mouse and even worse, the common rat you need to worry about. Make sure you remove the food scraps they feed on – including the big bag of bird seed or bonemeal you may think is sitting untouched in your garden shed.

Bear in mind that rodents loathe two smells – peppermint and used kitty litter. So if you don’t have a cat, you may want to acquire the latter from a friend who owns one – the stinkier the scat, the better.

One person I know put up a high pole with a crossbar outside in his yard. This gave owls a handy perch and a pair of them slowly picked off the local rodent population.

If that doesn’t help, you may need to take more drastic steps, but avoid poisons because the wrong creatures often fall victim to secondary poisoning – including cats, dogs and owls.

Squirrels and suricates 

Ground squirrels, meerkats and even tortoises are sometimes kept as pets in the Karoo and Kalahari. But there are very good reasons why this should not be so, starting with the fact that it is illegal unless you have a permit. If you don’t, you are liable for a sizeable fine. And yet we have had close encounters with all three.

Chippie, a ground squirrel, was the pet of the family next door and she would often come to visit us, completely bewildering our cats by refusing to act like prey and by sneaking up behind them and biting their tails, mischief in her shiny black eyes.

Eventually, we persuaded our neighbours that she should be rewilded and we took her to Ganora Guest Farm outside Nieu-Bethesda, where she lived in a squirrel paradise of lucerne and walnut trees, giving birth to several litters of adorable babies.

Hester Steynberg of Ganora, who has accepted many such former pets over the years, sighed as she told us that every time an episode of Meerkat Manor was aired on TV, there seemed to be an increase in suricate-napping. They are adorable when tiny but when hormones kick in, they often become problem pets.

“Meerkats will scratch holes in the carpets and remove the grouting between tiles,” she says. “They will also leave their droppings in inaccessible places.”

Hester adds that the laws on possession of wild animals have become even more stringent and the fines higher. 

Instead of taming wild animals, rather allow urban wildlife their own undisturbed space in your garden. Make an unpruned, unraked corner available for birds, bees, bumblebees, lizards and other creatures as a sanctuary or exclusion zone. 

Let the leaf litter pile up, leave old branches and tree trunks as homes for goggas, plant Indigenous species, allow weeds, let wild grasses go to seed and tolerate fruit rotting on the tree. In short, provide opportunities for animals and birds to feed, breed, nest and rest. 

Snake eyes

We heard about a tannie on a farm outside Philippolis who found a deadly puff adder in her house. She somehow snuck up behind it and cut off its head with pinking shears. 

Do not follow her example.

Most snakes are harmless, but some are dangerous, fast-moving and unpredictable. When confronted by a stray serpent, do not try to catch it or kill it on your own. On the plus side, many towns seem to have a resident snake catcher who will remove the offending reptile for you. Make sure you have his number on speed dial.

At most, put down some kind of tube closed at one end and open at the other, nearest to the snake. Chances are, it will be desperate for a hidey-hole and dive in. Then you can keep it confined until help arrives.

But when in doubt, simply step back and call the snake catcher. DM

For an insider’s view on semigration and small-town life in South Africa, get Moving to the Karoo and Road Tripper Eastern Cape Karoo (illustrated in black and white) by Julienne du Toit and Chris Marais for only R520, including courier costs in South Africa. For more details, contact Julie at [email protected]