Sightings - Campus Wild UCT

The Campus Observed

Evidence of non-human animals on UCT campuses is recorded on this website. Image and textual contributions from UCT staff and students are encouraged, and an annual exhibition of the best images will be held on upper campus in March of each year. A selection of these images will also be used in a book of essays and images, due for publication in 2024, that curates the campus wild.

Camera traps

Images from ICWild’s camera traps taken in March/April 2022 in the areas surrounding Upper Campus. Courtesy of Zoe Woodgate.

cats on campus

iCWild’s Nicoli Nattrass, Zoe Woodgate and Justin O’Riain’s recent paper Liminal Animals in a Liminal Space: Semi-feral cats on Cape Town’s urban edge discusses the history and impact of these animals on UCT’s Table Mountain campus.

Read the paper here.

Sightings of caracal in the area surrounding the University of Cape Town, mapped by the Urban Caracal Project. http://www.urbancaracal.org/

The Virtual Museum (The Biodiversity and Development Institute and The FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology) is a citizen science project that has recorded sightings of birds, reptiles, amphibian, insects and mammals in South Africa, many of them at UCT. This dead porcupine was photographed in 2012 at the stairs leading to Rhodes Memorial. https://vmus.adu.org.za/

The Isomi Birding Challenge UCT ran between February and June 2019, identifying 158 species

Real-life Pokémon GO for birders

https://www.news.uct.ac.za/news/cape-town-water-crisis/-article/2019-03-06-real-life-pokmon-go-for-birders