Safari & Company - Safari Adventures Custom Designed

Kalahari Meerkats

Ever the since the popular British television programme Meerkat Manor, there has been an increasing interest in meerkats (suricates). The result is that more people than ever before want to see these endearing mammals in the wild.

Meerkats are found in the drier regions of Botswana and do not occur in the Okavango Delta, Linyanti or Savuti areas. Instead they are to be found in the Kalahari and on a recent trip to Deception Valley in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, we enjoyed some excellent sightings.

Finding meerkats can be tricky for a few reasons the most obvious being their diminutive size. They are also very alert and often quite shy of people. However, there is one troop of these animals that have their territory in the Okwa River valley, which is in the vicinity of the main camping area at Deception Valley. With a bit of luck and some patience they can be found.

We were fortunate one afternoon in spotting these meerkats at a distance. We watched them for a while to see which way they were moving. Meerkats bed down for the night in a hole, and there was a series of holes with ground squirrels in attendance, not too far away, and right alongside the road. It looked as if they were gradually making their way towards these holes. We drove around and waited for them to approach. The advantage of sitting quietly and waiting for wildlife to approach you is that other creatures get used to the vehicle's presence, and we soon had an entire family of ground squirrels eating, fighting and playing alongside the vehicle.

As the sun got lower, the six meerkats made their way right up to us. One meerkat chased off a squirrel very easily, and then they groomed and bonded and enjoyed the last half an hour of the day's sunshine within a few yards of us, making for some excellent photo opportunities.

Grant Atkinson (Wilderness Safaris guide)