Waking up with the meerkats in Oudtshoorn

When you come on our tours, you’re getting to watch a group of meerkats that we’ve habituated over more than a decade. The goal is to keep it as natural as possible and to interfere with the animals’ lives as little as possible. We’re purely there to observe; we don’t feed them or train them to do funny tricks. They’re free to roam wherever they want, which means that the night before we have to go out to check which burrow system they’re using out of more than 20 they could stay at, so we know where they’ll be the next morning.

One of the most frequent comments we get is, ‘It’s worth the early wake-up!’ And it is an early start because we get to the burrow before sunrise so we can get comfortably seated in our camping chairs while the meerkats are still sleeping. Then we wait for them to wake up, which is all up to them. Generally, it’s not longer than 30 minutes to an hour – we try and plan it nicely, as much as we can. And then we get to see what the meerkats do on a daily basis. 

Every morning is similar but not the same, because it’s nature, you never know what’s going to happen. But the basic routine is that the meerkats will emerge and start warming up using the sun if it is available; if it’s not, they’ll use different methods like cuddling up together, what we call the meerkat totem pole where they’re all huddled up together and you just see little faces sticking up. Or the other one is staying active by cleaning out the burrows. So we observe this and then a little bit of social behaviour: scent marking, sorting out the social hierarchy in the group and then heading off to forage for the morning. And the guides explain what the meerkats are doing and why, so you’re not just sitting there mutely. The whole thing probably lasts about two or three hours in total.

One of the benefits of working with the meerkats the way we do is that they don’t rely on us for food. So if we don’t run the tours for any reason, the meerkats just carry on with their daily lives as normal. When we are there, we are basically just extra decorations, looking at them but not interfering with them. We’re very careful not to do anything to make them feel threatened, so we sit about five metres away in a line on one side of the burrow so they have the freedom to leave whenever they like. Not that we’re likely to stop doing the tours any time soon. People are fascinated by meerkats, and once you get to learn more about them – their habits, the intense social structure that they have – they become even more relatable.