Sneaky bastards

I often remind others of the great dangers of the bush... that is monkeys and mice stealing your food, soap or mosquito repellent! Keep an eye on your food, lock it away safely and close all windows and doors and, for God's sake, zip up your tent!

 

Having breakfast in the bush, someone is always watching you, eagerly waiting for you to loose focus for half a second. They really don't need more time than that!

Me and Desiré even went to the bathroom in shifts, so that we wouldn't have to store everything away and zip up our tents all the time. On one of my shifts I noticed a banded mongoose about twenty metres away and decided to try and get a photo of it. Biiiig mistake! I was standing right outside the food tent, but since my focus was elsewhere, a vervet monkey, swift as a swallow, jumped in, stole our bread and was gone again in 2 seconds... It dropped the bag after having been chased up into a tree and the whole troop came running for the scattered slices. Furious about my stupidity and tomorrow morning's probable starvation, I gathered most of the bread and threw it in the bin. Only two slices survived the vervets' rough handling!

 

One afternoon, after a game drive, we saw a bunch of mongooses running off as we approached our camp. Then we noticed that the bedroom tent had been opened about 10 cm. Odd, since we stored neither valuables nor food there. However, we did have a first aid kit... Apparently even mongooses have ailments that require urgent treatment.

They'd opened up the tent just enough, got in and stolen anti-inflammatories, as well as allergex blister packs! We found a couple of them around the camp site, but one of the allergex packs was missing and one third of an anti-inflammatory tablet had been eaten; they at least seem to have got the dosage correct! One of our neighbours remarked that he must have been quite surprised to find that his bad knee didn't bother him anymore...

 

After all this, we got two wires that we twined the two zips closed with... and thought we were really smart. 

 

The enigma was the missing allergexes... but that one was solved the very next day. After another drive in Mapungubwe, the tablets had miraculously found their way back, lying in plain view, in the middle of the camp site. We figured that the mongooses realized they actually didn't need them and dropped them in the bush, as they scurried off. The vervet monkeys must have found the shiny package interesting and climbed our Nyala tree and up there found out that these things weren't very tasty and just dropped them... or maybe as an apology for the stolen bread..?

Happy about our find, we opened up the tents, expecting them to be untouched. Inside the food tent though, there was a small little chaos waiting for us; boxes had been chewed through and there were bits and pieces of them everywhere! Playing detectives, we soon came to the conclusion that a squirrel had been the third visitor and that it had chewed its way in, through the canvas and the mosquito net. Why on earth it didn't eat the tomatoes or the cereal instead of cardboard however remains an unsolved mystery.

Apparently third time's a charm and we didn't have any more sneaky creatures rummaging through our temporary home. Luckily we managed quite well without all the bread, tablets and... cardboard?!

/A