24/05/2026
What is happening to the Waterfall troop in Simon’s Town?
That is the question I will be asking management this week.
Because what we are witnessing again in Waterfall looks painfully familiar to some of us who have watched this unfold for years. The troop is stressed. The females look stressed. The babies look stressed. The troop is fragmented, reactive, unsettled and constantly running. And instead of asking why, management seems intent on doubling down on the very methods that created these conditions in the first place.
One of the most baffling recent decisions has been the reshuffling of experienced field managers and rangers out of Simon’s Town - people who knew this area intimately. In a place like Waterfall, that knowledge matters enormously. The topography, the escape routes, the politics, the sleep sites, the residents, the waste hotspots, the patterns of movement, the people who exaggerate incidents and the people who report honestly, all of that matters.
You cannot manage Simon’s Town with a copy-and-paste militant approach.
And yet that is exactly what it increasingly feels like.
For years now, many of us have watched experienced local knowledge replaced with aggressive enforcement tactics that seem designed more to satisfy a certain intolerant segment of the community than to actually achieve long-term coexistence or welfare outcomes.
I remember years ago, after Bongo(1st alpha) was killed(by management for no real decent reason except to appease one resident who demanded it)
- seeing the females afterwards. Thin. Terrified. Hair loss. Hyper-vigilant. I didn’t know much about baboons back then, but even then I could see something was wrong. These were not healthy, relaxed animals. They were traumatised animals.
And now, again, we are seeing babies clinging to mothers while being pushed through roads and urban areas under relentless pressure.
Residents phone me regularly describing incidents that are deeply disturbing: baboons being paintballed while trying to cross roads back toward the mountain; females with babies being shot at while fleeing traffic; rangers firing indiscriminately into groups containing infants; baboons chased repeatedly instead of calmly guided.
And before anyone twists this into ranger-bashing - that is not what this is.
Simon’s Town is incredibly difficult terrain to manage. Many rangers are under enormous pressure themselves and are being forced to operate under changing leadership, changing directives and increasingly punitive methodologies. The problem is not individual rangers trying to survive their jobs. The problem is the philosophy driving this management style.
Because there is a difference between managing baboons and punishing baboons.
And right now, Waterfall feels punished.
The irony is that so many practical, inexpensive management solutions continue to be ignored. For years residents and organisations have offered to help sponsor and trial flexible interventions including temporary evening closures or controlled access on the Waterfall footpath during critical roosting periods so troops can settle peacefully at sleep sites.
But somehow there are endless excuses why that cannot be done.
Yet capturing, displacing, terrorising and relentlessly aversively conditioning baboons is apparently considered perfectly reasonable.
On Friday evening, I watched the troop move towards the sleep site. Rangers then continued pushing them deeper, but at the same time, dozens of hikers walked directly through the baboons’ path area. At this time of year especially, large numbers of people use the waterfall path to visit the waterfall, and unfortunately that constant movement can be hugely disturbing to a troop trying to settle for the night.
People need to understand that getting baboons to sleep site is a delicate process. It is not just the rangers trying to hold the line. It is the baboons themselves trying to settle and feel secure enough to remain there. But baboons will only stay at a sleep site if they feel calm and safe. It does not take much to unsettle them. One animal becomes nervous and moves off, and very quickly the rest follow.
And very predictably, the troop came back down again.
And every time this happens, the explanation becomes the same predictable narrative:that there must be an attractant lower down: somebody’s fruit tree, somebody’s dustbin, somebody feeding them. Sometimes that is true. But very often it completely ignores the actual sequence of events that people who watch these troops properly witness in real time.
The baboons are not always being pulled down by food. Often they are being pushed out because they no longer feel safe or settled where they are. One animal becomes disturbed and runs, and then the troop follows. That is how baboons work.
This is something we have seen repeatedly over the years. A sudden disturbance, pressure from management, conflict within the troop, or repeated stress in their sleeping area can trigger movement long before any food source becomes part of the picture. Once one or two individuals break away, the rest follow because troop cohesion is central to their survival. They move together, even when the direction is not ideal.
Once they are back in the urban area as a collective, of course they will then forage opportunistically. If there are bins, fruit trees or food sources available, they will use them before settling for the night. But that is very different from saying that food was the original reason they came down in the first place.
Too often the public conversation skips over this distinction entirely. The visible outcome- baboons in town eating from bins or gardens becomes treated as the cause rather than the consequence. But if we genuinely want to understand and reduce these incidents, we have to pay attention to what happened before the troop entered the urban edge, not just what they did once they arrived.
That distinction matters.
What is so frustrating is that many of these patterns were avoidable. Before formal management escalated, baboons largely moved through the urban edge quickly and returned to the mountain. The dramatic escalation in urban occupation coincided with changing waste conditions, increasing attractants, aggressive management tactics and the gradual breakdown of stable troop behaviour.
And yet somehow the baboons themselves continue to be framed as the entire problem.
At what point do we honestly ask whether the management itself has become part of the crisis?
Because these photographs are not just photographs of baboons.
They are photographs of stress.
Of pressure.
Of confusion.
Of a troop living under constant disruption.
And some of us are no longer willing to pretend that this is normal.
