On the slopes of Table Mountain. From left: Eduardo Bicudo, Sarah Brooke, Colette Borain and John Cooper, photograph by Thelma Marques
The Mouse-Free Marion Mountain Walkers held its inaugural outing on Sunday 03 November. Seven of us (and one dog) walked an easy four kilometres for a little over an hour along trails on the slopes of Table Mountain above the city of Cape Town. The group is an offshoot of the Mouse-Free Marion Cycling Team, with members wearing a running shirt version of the team’s distinctive cycling jersey featuring a flying Wandering Albatross Diomedea exulans emblazoned on its back.
The Mouse-Free Marion shirts do attract attention from the back. Tessa Wood, Colette Borain and Sarah Brooke look over the city bowl towards Lion’s Head, photograph by John Cooper
The Mouse-Free Marion Mountain Walkers on the lower slopes of Table Mountain, photograph by Thelma Marques
The walk fell within the Table Mountain National Park, part of the Cape Floral Region Protected Areas World Heritage Site. Cape Sugarbirds Promerops cafer and Orange-breasted Sunbirds Anthobaphes violacea were actively foraging for insects and nectar within the flowers of pin cushions Leucospermum cordifolium. Both birds are South African endemics. We were pleased to hear a Red-chested Cuckoo Cuculus solitarius with its distinctive “Piet-my-vrou” (Peter-my-wife) three-note call coming from a grove of trees. The walk was followed by a picnic in the Deer Park reserve, enlivened by a circling Jackal Buzzard Buteo rufofuscus above the introduced but shade-giving Mediterranean Stone Pines Pinus pinea.
Picnicking in Deer Park. From left Tessa Wood, Colette Borain, Sarah Brooke, Thelma Marques and Eduardo Bicudo, photograph by John Cooper
To mark the group’s first outing, a one-hectare sponsorship was made to the the Saving Marion Island’s Seabirds: The Mouse-Free Marion (MFM) Project. The next planned outing on 30 November 2025 will be more ambitious: a 16-km combined run and walk from Constantia Nek up to and around the mountain-top dams and back, when a further sponsorship is to be expected.
Perhaps other conservation-minded walking groups will consider sponsoring a hectare (or more) on one of their outings in support of saving Marion Island’s threatened seabirds from depredations by the introduced House Mice.
John Cooper, News Correspondent, Mouse-Free Marion Project, 13 November 2025
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“Acaena Fields”, watercolour by Kitty Harvill, after a photograph of flowering Acaena magellanica on Marion Island by Camilla Smyth
The Mouse-Free Marion Project is a registered non-profit company (No. 2020/922433/08) in South Africa, established to eradicate the invasive albatross-killing mice on Marion Island in the Southern Ocean. The project was initiated by BirdLife South Africa and the South African Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment. Upon successful completion, the project will restore the critical breeding habitat of over two million seabirds, many globally threatened, and improve the island’s resilience to a warming climate. For more information or to support the project please visit mousefreemarion.org.
