Simonsberg Slopes Circuit #9: Meerkat Corner
This is the last of a series of 9 caches hidden on the lower slopes of Simonsberg (548m), the northernmost peak of the Swartkop Mountains range which runs from Simon’s Town to Smitswinkel. The caches form a potential 4km circuit on a mix of good tar road, stony sandy jeep tracks, sandy/rocky trails and steep indistinct gravelly/bushy trails marked by occasional cairns. The D/T ratings reflect the shortest route to the cache.
The cache, a medium-sized, green-taped, screw-capped plastic pot, is hidden near a corner of a palisade fence surrounding the residential properties below. Some 25m down from the cache location are a couple of meerkat statues attached to a large flat rock @ S 34 12.005 E 18 26.779.
To reach the cache location:
Park @ S 34 11.967 E 18 26.909 on Jan Smuts Drive and after securing your vehicle (no valuables visible), make your way up the jeep track to somewhere near S 34 12.043 E 18 26.861 on the edge of the firebreak, then head along/across the firebreak to the cache location.
The meerkat or suricate (Suricata suricatta) is a small carnivore (and sometime cannibal!) belonging to the mongoose family (Herpestidae). It lives in all parts of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, in much of the Namib Desert in Namibia and southwestern Angola, and in South Africa. A group of meerkats is called a ‘mob’, ‘gang’ or ‘clan’.
A meerkat clan often contains about 20 meerkats, but some super-families have 50 or more members. In captivity, meerkats have an average life span of 12–14 years, and about half this in the wild.
In early literature, suricates were referred as mierkat. In colloquial Afrikaans, mier means termite, and kat means cat. It is thought that the name comes from their frequent association with termite mounds or the termites they eat.
It is a small diurnal herpestid (mongoose) weighing on average about 0.5-2.5 kg. Its long slender body and limbs give it a body length of 35-50 cm and an added tail length of around 25 cm. It uses its tail to balance when standing upright, as well as for signalling. Its face tapers, coming to a point at the nose, which is brown. The eyes always have black patches around them, and they have small black crescent-shaped ears. Like cats, meerkats have binocular vision, their eyes being on the front of their faces.
At the end of each of a meerkat's ‘fingers’ is a claw used for digging burrows and digging for prey. Claws 
are also used with muscular hindlegs to help climb trees. Meerkats have four toes on each foot and long slender limbs. The coat is usually peppered gray, tan, or brown with silver. They have short parallel stripes across their backs, extending from the base of the tail to the shoulders.[14] The patterns of stripes are unique to each meerkat. The underside of the meerkat has no markings, but the belly has a patch which is only sparsely covered with hair and shows the black skin underneath. The meerkat uses this area to absorb heat while standing on its rear legs, usually early in the morning after cold desert nights.
Diet and foraging behaviour: they are primarily insectivores, but also eat other animals (lizards, snakes, scorpions, spiders, eggs, small mammals, millipedes, centipedes and, more rarely, small birds), plants and fungi. They are immune to certain types of venom, including the very strong venom of the scorpions of the Kalahari Desert.
Baby meerkats do not start foraging for food until they are about 1 month old, and do so by following an older member of the group who acts as the pup's tutor. They forage in a group with one ‘sentry’ on guard watching for predators while the others search for food. Sentry duty is usually approximately an hour long. The meerkat standing guard makes peeping sounds when all is well.
It has the ability to dig through a quantity of sand equal to its own weight in just seconds. Digging is done to create burrows, to get food and also to create dust clouds to distract predators.
Predators: martial eagles, tawny eagles and jackals are its main predators. Meerkats sometimes die of snakebite in confrontations with snakes (puff adders and Cape cobras).
Behaviour: they are small burrowing animals, living in large underground networks with multiple entrances which they leave only during the day, except to avoid the heat of the afternoon. They are very social creatures and they live in colonies together. Animals in the same group groom each other regularly. The alpha pair often scent-mark subordinates of the group to express their authority.
To look out for predators, one or more meerkats stand sentry, to warn others of approaching dangers. 
When a predator is spotted, the meerkat performing as sentry gives a warning bark or whistle, and other members of the group run and hide in one of the many holes they have spread across their territory.
Meerkats as pets: not a good idea! Being wild animals, they make poor pets. They can be aggressive, especially toward guests and they may also bite. They will also scent-mark their territory – ie. The owner and the house!
See here for more info, and here and here for a good short NG videos on these entertaining little creatures. See here for an encounter between meerkats and a cobra and here for a time-lapse pastel painting of a meerkat.
Meerkats in the media: Meerkat Manor was a very popular 53-episode 4-series documentary aired initially on the Animal Planet channel from Sep 2005- Aug 2008. It told the story of the Whiskers, one of over a dozen meerkat families being studied as part of the Kalahari Meerkat Project, a long-term field study into the ecological causes and evolutionary consequences of the cooperative nature of meerkats. See here for Series 1 Episodes 1-4.
Compare the Meerkat is a highly successful advertising campaign on British and Australian commercial television. The adverts feature Aleksandr Orlov, a CGI fictional anthropomorphic Russian meerkat and his family and friends. See here for a typical short video.