This week’s photo challenge is “Horizon” – The space or line where the sky meets the earth. So many places where the sky meets the earth around the world, and millions of interactions between two elements. It can be water, a city skyline, a forest, a wasteland, a desert, a sunset outside your bedroom window. Is there a particular horizon which speaks to you? Visit the link here to find out more on the subject.
Looking out over the bay towards the same distant mountains is one of the peninsula’s baboons. They are trapped in confined areas, their movements curtailed by urban sprawl and no longer able to wander at will. I often wonder about the call of the ‘wild’ baboon.
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Nature on the Edge 
Such beautiful colour tones in the first photo.
Thanks Colline 🙂
Cool photos and I like the way you’ve described it. Is the remaining land protected or will the baboons eventually be driven away completely?
It’s quite a curious situation, where the baboons on the peninsula are ‘protected’ (as long as they conform to a set regulation of behaviour), whereas the wild baboons are not. Once they are deemed ‘raiders’ or become aggressive, then they are euthanised. As a species we’re informed that the baboons aren’t endangered, although the population here on the peninsula is small – around 475. There is a management strategy to keep them away from the urban edge and to drive them back onto the mountain. Although the troops within the Cape Point Reserve are assured their spot on the peninsula the remaining troops outside are in quite a tenuous position. I think it comes down to an ethical question if their lives are so compromised, would it not be better for them all to be culled? I hope it never comes to that, as they’re an iconic part of Table Mountain.
Wonderful colours. The lonely baboon gives me a strange, sad feeling though. As if he was looking to the horizon for his lost freedom.
Thanks for the comments Ann-Christine, and perceptive too. Every now and then a dispersing male baboon tries to make it through the urban sprawl to the yonder mountains, but they get caught up in the snarl of motorways, rail tracks, suburbs. So many of our wild creatures are curtailed to reduced habitats…
I simply love the first photo…
Thanks for dropping in, Amos.
My pleasure!
Excellent choices. Love the last!
Thanks Tina 🙂
Love the shot with the babboon!!
Thanks Janaline….. yes he’s a ‘survivor’ … possibly the oldest baboon on the peninsula.
Lovely photographs, Liz. The last one is a gem! It makes such a powerful statement about we are driving other species into extinction.
… a sad reflection.
Beautiful, Liz. You share the fabulous view with the baboons, but it really isn’t the same for them is it? Sigh.
You’re spot on Sid…. although there are wild baboons in the mountains, the Peninsula baboons are restricted in their movements. Some of the males have tried to disperse through the urban sprawl but get caught up in the city. They’re captured and either ‘euthanised’ or relocated back to another area on the Peninsula. There’s a policy not to relocate them into the country or near wild populations as they can carry human pathogens through rummaging through litter, waste bins, and at one point it was feared they had contracted TB (although thankfully that appears not to be the case). Our transformed landscapes present dangerous obstacles for wild creatures with dispersal / migratory instincts.