The Hilltop Gang

When I’m not on the field, I stay at the camp and do the so-called “office work”, creating endless Excel sheets of field data and watching hundreds of videos from my camera traps. If I’m lucky, most of these videos show African wildlife in action – impalas peeing, honey badgers scratching about, hyenas curiously sniffing at the camera, gnus fighting, lions passing. In the opposite case, I get waving grass. Unfortunately I can’t just skip footage of moving vegetation – every single caption has to be watched from the start to the end to make sure no impala ran into the shot at the very end of the recording. Which doesn’t seem much regarding the length of it (30s), but after the 486^th same video of pure nothing, you feel truly miserable and start questioning your role in this cruel game of science.

Despite the mentioned drawbacks of the above mentioned data analysis, you enjoy the benefits of the office work. Safety of your room – no elephants sneaking up behind your back and no bizarre, creepy sounds coming out of the bushes – allows inattentive attitude. Most of the times, it brings no bad consequences, but yesterday that was not the case because it was the day when The Hilltop gang of vervet monkeys decided to pay us a visit.

Vervet monkeys are not just regular monkeys, they are a bunch of little demons. Samango monkeys, for example, are around our camp all the time and are a nice-looking, pleasant and well behaved company, keeping their safety distance from us inhabitants and happily eating fruits of the trees. Vervets, on the other hand, think they can do whatever comes on their little minds. They won’t hesitate breaking into the kitchen, stealing a pack of sugar, ripping it open and running away with it to get totally sugar-high behind the closest evergreen bush. Also, they won’t aim strictly for the kitchen – they will rather make sure that none of the doors are hiding any treats. Which means they’ll closely inspect every single room in the camp. Even if there’s someone sitting inside, busy watching videos of waving grass.

So it happened that I suddenly noticed a little monkey-shaped creature staring at me through the open window, ready to jump in the room and trash my stuff looking for sweets. 

Yelling at it didn’t help (nor doing so in Slovenian), clapping hands and waving at it did neither and only getting as close that closing the window requires kept it outside my room. With my windows and doors shut, the monkey tried its luck elsewhere. Soon I heard a scream next door - one of the vervets fearlessly ran towards the open door, showing its teeth ferociously to the person standing there, defending its belongings. One can just guess how the assault would end up if the monkey hadn’t been chased away with a chair. That’s how rude the vervets are, no respect for personal property, no respect whatsoever.

Luckily the gang was gone by the afternoon, and we were all relieved to see the Samangos back in the trees before it got dark. Let’s just hope the vervets weren’t satisfied with the treasures that this place offers and that next time they will rather stay at the Hilltop tourist resort, where people are naïve and food is plentiful.