The dynamics of crop-foraging by chacma baboons on commercial farms in South Africa

One of the most common conflicts between people and wildlife takes the form of crop raiding, which is widespread and an issue throughout the world. Crop raiding is a high-risk behaviour for wildlife, but it is also a high-gain foraging strategy - successful raiders derive substantial nutritional benefits from crops. Primates rank amongst the most problematic of species that forage on crops, and baboons are often cited as the most damaging of all primate crop raiding species. Being highly intelligent and adaptable, farmers often have little success preventing crop damage by primates. Raiding significantly impacts farmers' livelihoods and so reduces tolerance to wildlife and often results in lethal methods of retaliation. Mitigation can only be successful if the risk to animals of crop raiding is increased to outweigh its benefits, but this requires a detailed understanding of the dynamics of crop foraging by the baboons. Since baboons in farming areas are often highly wary of humans, observational methods are limited in their applicability. Innovative approaches are thus required to investigate this problem.

Recently, GPS tracking collars with accelerometers have been used to explore the behavioural strategies of male chacma baboons used when raiding in the suburbs of Cape Town, South Africa. The baboons spent almost all of their time at the urban edge, using short, high-activity forays into the urban areas to obtain anthropogenic food. Activity levels were also increased where the likelihood of deterrence by rangers was greater. Raiding baboons had thus dramatically altered their activity patterns compared to natural foraging populations to exploit the energy sources offered by human habitation while minimising the risks of persecution in these areas. Such an understanding allows management strategies to be appropriately targeted.

The majority of research on crop raiding has focused on the conflict between wildlife and subsistence agriculturalists. However, wildlife damage to large-scale commercial agriculture is also a major facet of human-wildlife conflict and presents conservation challenges of its own, not least because of significant economic costs of primate damage to commercial farms. Further research in these commercial contexts is a priority. The primary objective of this project is to use sophisticated bio-loggers to understand baboon crop-foraging within a commercial farming region of South Africa that reports high levels of human-primate conflict. The results will be used to support the development of management plans to reduce human-wildlife conflict in the region.