Kalahari meerkats having a ball playing boules

Suricates enjoying a game of boules. The notion might just about be credible on TV back home as part of that long-running ad campaign for a UK price comparison website featuring a clan of movie-loving meerkats. Two-for-one tickets for a classic French cinema season anyone? But meerkats enjoying a game of boules in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (KTP), southern Africa’s legendary Kalahari wilderness area, we’re kidding right?

Playtime in camp. The curious meerkat mob join in an impromptu game of boules. Simples!

No seriously when you’ve been following an inquisitive, forever-on-the-move, mob of 18 photogenic meerkats around camp for several days we’ve learned that nothing should surprise you. The sports-loving meerkats are denning regularly in one of the KTP’s tourist rest-camps, coming and going as they please. One minute they’re dashing out into the reserve through the perimeter fence to forage, the next they’re scuttling across the border onto the Namibian farmlands beyond the park for a change of scene. No park permits or passports required. They have the run of the place and you’re never quite sure when they’ll turn up next. Predicting where they’ll pop up is quite a challenge. But while we’re tailing them and waiting patiently for the best photographic light in which to photograph them their antics provide us with a constant source of entertainment.

Young meerkat getting into the game if not quite getting to grips with the rules

Other tourists can’t get enough of them either, or certainly that’s the case for the first few days following their arrival at camp. After that the novelty wears off a bit and they begin to treat them as part of the furniture. The feeling’s mutual. The clan’s equally curious about anyone, or anything, new on the block, but in the end we humans, and all our attendant clobber, barely make it onto a meerkat’s radar. We’re useful only for the extra vantage point our stuff can offer a passing meerkat sentry (and for the odd ball game of course).

The meerkats have the run of the camp – you’re never sure where they’ll be rushing next

This disregard is a huge boon to us as photographers because it means we can approach closer than usual (amazingly close when wielding a wide angle lens if you go carefully and behave as though you’re one of the mob). It also means we can exploit intimate low angles on eye-level with these engaging subjects without affecting their natural behaviour – something that would never be possible when photographing their cousins living deeper in the park.

These guys are everywhere. Foraging for food in the sand while checking the coast’s clear

It’s not just us photographers who reap the benefits from these shared living arrangements. There’s an upside for the meerkats too. It’s much safer having itinerant human strangers for neighbours compared to the predators that threaten clan members’ survival out there in the reserve. Plus, there’s the bonus of occasional scraps of food, particularly welcome in leaner times, from visitors breaking South Africa national park rules to feed them titbits from the table or braai (BBQ). Perhaps because we humans seldom serve up big fat scorpions, or the grubs the meerkats are constantly busy digging up about the place, the mob thankfully hasn’t become too reliant on visitor handouts so far. But they have certainly become habituated.

A young tourist is fascinated by his new neighbours on arrival at camp

We first met the gang two years ago. The group was smaller then and quite a bit shyer, but just as this year the alpha female was pregnant (meerkats tend to breed in the summer months) and there were a couple of comical youngsters in two. Last year, although we visited the Kalahari at the same time, we only crossed paths with them very briefly, despite checking their den spots every evening following our game drive just in case they came back. Call us sad if you want to, but if you’d spent any time with these guys you’d also get attached. And, let’s face it, the potential for a saleable photo story was so appealing, we were happy to delay that first cold beer at sundown for the slim chance of some nice images and hearing their incessant chattering once again.

Tourists and meerkats soon lose interest in each other

So you can imagine our sweet surprise when there they were again, right outside the door of our chalet, as if ready to welcome us, as soon as we opened it to head off on our very first afternoon game drive. The chance to follow an habituated group of suricates on foot in the golden hours was too good to pass up, so once again we found ourselves abandoning this and many subsequent evening drives to follow them. And on days when we knew they were definitely denning in camp, we made a point of returning after drives by 6.50am in the mornings to photograph them too. Six-fifty being the precise time the meerkats popped out of the burrow each morning, regular as clockwork, to warm up in the early sunshine.

It’s no trouble putting the time in like this when you have a fabulous and fascinating bunch of busy characters that never fail to perform for our cameras. The ton of sand that gets into every bodily crevice when you’re lying prone on the thorn-strewn ground in anticipation of your picture is nothing when your lens is trained on a meerkat beautifully silhouetted against a swoosh of golden dust that’s obligingly being dug up in just the right spot by one of his campadres.

With wild meerkats this habituated we can get ultra close with our wide angle lenses

Wildlife photography, it turns out, is as much about the connection with your subjects in the run-up to a picture as it is about that ‘decisive moment’ when the shutter button’s clicked. You can’t put a value on experiences like this. Being a meerkat’s shadow from the moment it’s chocolate-coloured snout emerges from the burrow at 6.50am to the moment its chocolate-tipped tail disappears down into the hole of its den for the night. We’ll take that every time. Being in and amongst them, trailing after the last of them all around the camp and back and them not caring a fig about us ‘coming with’ was something special

Here are just some of the many moments we shared…