The Meerkat Man
Australia once had a fictional Crocodile Dundee. Well, South Africa now has its very own, and very real, Meerkat Man.
Devey Glinister, who wears a leather cowboy hat with a guinea fowl feather sticking out of its brim, and drives the biggest bakkie the R62 has ever seen, has been rescuing and rehabilitating wild animals and birds his whole life.
“I came across meerkats during one of my horse riding safaris, and then read up about them,” says Devey (pronounced Dee-vee). “I discovered that many people tried to keep them as pets, with horrible consequences.” Members of the snake-killing mongoose family, these long clawed critters are obsessive scent markers. This means that they make particularly smelly pets, and their burrowing instinct makes them natural born home and furniture wreckers.
Since Devey has successfully rehabilitated wild antelope, tortoises, owls and raptors in the past, he became curious about meerkats, and decided to get to know a group (known as a gang, or clan). “I started at a distance of about 200 m from the burrow complex,” Devey explains, “and every day I went two to three metres closer.” After six months the animals become habituated to Devey, which has allowed him to “introduce” the gang to tour groups. He does this under one condition, however: The animals may not be fed.
Devey calls the current colony, on the farm DeZeekoe just outside Oudtshoorn, “Meerkatville”. He regularly conducts meerkat tours to the site, where visitors need to arrive before sunrise to catch the meerkats in their fascinating morning ritual. This involves warming their hairless bellies in the early sunrays, as well as nominating babysitters and sentries before setting off to forage.
Devey has come to know the colony so well that he has learned the different personalities of the males and females (each meerkat sports a unique stripe pattern which makes it easier to identify them), and has named the most outlandish characters in the clan.
Devey points to “Liefie”, the dominant female. “When I met her,” Devey explains. “I called her ‘liefie’ and ‘sweety’ and ‘darling’. I was trying to sweet talk her so that she would let me come closer. These kind of things work with females,” Devey adds, with a wink. “So she got stuck with the name Liefie. Moaner is the dominant male. When I met Liefie and her babies there was no dominant male present, but after the meerkats were habituated and I started doing the tours, a wild male joined the group. Because he had not been habituated, Moaner initially made it very difficult for me; he was always complaining to me about these human intrusions into ‘his’ family.”
Devey’s humour is idiosyncratically South African, and when he talks about the gang of “skarmunkels”, one cannot help getting a sense of his special fondness for these critters.
“Molly,” Devey points out, “is the oldest daughter, and the rebel of the family. If she were human, she would have a nose ring and would wear black makeup. She is a very independent meerkat and does her own thing. She goes on solo trips on a regular basis and then, after a couple of days, she just pitches up out of the blue as if she had never been gone. Very few meerkats can leave the family and return without being killed.” Devey explains that in the meerkat world you can only belong to the group if you are regularly urinated on.
The Meerkat tours are not without their funny incidents. Devey recalls explaining to a group about the various insects that form part of the meerkat diet, when a big grasshopper landed on a woman’s leg. “The woman began to scream hysterically,” Devey chuckles, “and jumped onto her chair. Immediately all of the other guests started screaming and climbing onto their chairs… Only, they had no idea why!”
But it is not hard to share in Devey’s fascination with these often very human-like animals. Their tendency to stand on their hind legs and survey Africa’s wide, open spaces is one they have shared with humans over the ages. And by meeting the meerkats up close and following their alert gaze, it is easy to feel afresh the beauty that surrounds them.
“After all the beautiful rain we had this year, our semi-desert Karoo landscape has turned into a flowering wonderland. I had a couple of flower power children from Cambridge University on tour the other day, and the meerkats started feeling neglected, the way the people were giving more attention to the flowers,” says Devey. “But tomorrow’s another day with another episode of the Meerkatville soapy.”
Story & Pix © Nick van der Leek
