Substantial populations of jackals now live in a number of European countries, including Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Austria, Italy, and above all, Bulgaria, which has the largest population. That claim to fame has been lost: The North African animal that may have inspired the sculptures of Anubis has been reclassified as the African wolf. The Egyptian god Anubis was sometimes said to have a jackal’s head. Jackals did have one moment of past glory. Hemingway described “personal columnists” as jackals, which no doubt refers to their scavenging habits. Jackals are not as prominent in tales and proverbs as some other animals, although there’s an old quote, variously attributed, that it is better to live like a lion for a day than a jackal for 100 years. Like wolves and coyotes, jackals have family-based packs, but the groups tend to be smaller, with four to six animals, while wolf packs may include 15 animals.Ī monogamous pair of jackals forms the core of a pack the young may stay with the parents, or leave to establish their own packs. Jackals are one of the least studied canine predators. But the current boom really began in the 1950s and has accelerated over the past 20 years. The species arrived at the southern edge of Central and Eastern Europe about 8,000 years ago, fossil evidence suggests, and started to expand slowly in the 19th century.
It is native to the Middle East and southern Asia, ranging as far east as Thailand and inhabiting Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Smaller than North American coyotes, the golden jackal weighs an average 20 pounds. And it has only started to capture scientific interest in Europe, which is beginning to grapple with what the expansion means ecologically, and what the issues are in terms of conservation and legal status. This is an unheard-of expansion of a medium-sized predator into a continent that it once inhabited only on the fringes. Slovenia itself has somewhere between 200 and 400 jackals, Dr. By contrast, a high estimate of Europe’s wolves is about 17,000. Jackals now vastly outnumber Europe’s wolves, totaling at most 117,000 by the latest official estimate.
Krofel and Nathan Ranc, a doctoral student at Harvard and the Edmund Mach Foundation in Italy. He and 37 other volunteers - scientists and naturalists, dedicated and informed - have been monitoring the animals throughout Europe. Krofel said came from a corncrake, a bird that is endangered in Slovenia. We heard dogs barking, unidentified rustling in the bushes, and a faint “krek krek” call that Dr.