Intercontinental Expansionist – Indian Golden Jackal

Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary ; Assam

My recent getaway to Pobitora had a few pleasant surprises for me like I was telling you in my previous post about the Blue-Throated Barbet and the most welcome of those surprises was meeting Golden Jackals at that pretty little reserve. I always say that we’ve done a very good job in our efforts in the conservation of big cats in this country but we really oughta pay a little more attention to our wild dogs and I’m sure that the matter must be pretty obvious to the professionals if a hobbyist photographer can recognise this need as far as conservation goes. Well, I might just have run into a place that actively adresses that for a change and without putting them in competition with the growing number of big Cats in the country. There have also been quite a few other welcome steps in the direction with the setting up of captive breeding programmes for Dhole and the setting up of Wolf Sanctuaries like the Mahuadanr and Bankapur Sanctuaries in Jharkhand and Karnataka. The blatantly visible issue here though is the slow progress of these efforts. The import of Cheetahs gained national spotlight because of the prestige attached to the politics of that decision and the subsequent pressure on the success of the programme. Those animals have been located, relocated, tracked and pampered. Their needs have been scrutinized and catered to at macro levels while the Golden Jackal, which thrived in this environment historically and spread all the way to Europe from here continues to remain on the sidelines mostly along with Wolves and Dhole. There’s some slow progress and that’s progress none the less and I for one am very glad that I finally encountered these guys at close proximity at Pobitora. It’s a little skewed when you finally get close to a Jackal after over a decade of seeing Tigers and Leopards up close when out in the wild but that’s just how it is no matter how you want to call it. If project Cheetah teaches us something, it’s perhaps that conservation like everything else needs will and pressure from the highest levels in this country to be efficient.

I saw my first Jackal at Pobitora within the first fifteen minutes of entering the sanctuary and while she was out and about close to the entry gate on that bright afternoon. She wasn’t startled or nervous on seeing us at all and proceeded to cool off at a shallow watering hole before continuing on with her business which might have involved a possible road crossing. In fact, I had three encounters with Golden Jackals in my three trips into Pobitora and she was much braver than the others that I encountered on my trips into the reserve. Now, I have no idea about the social structure of the Jackals in the tourism area of the place but I’m guessing that she must be used to the vehicles given that she’s chosen territory right at the entrance. She walked up to the road, looked out for something and then decided to back track and walk off to the side. I had her at a pretty close distance and the light was good for my needs. It was a very nice, unhurried and casual kind of interaction where we didn't seem to bother her much at all and I knew right then that I’d probably scored the best pictures of the species that I had managed till then. She posed very beautifully while doing her check outs and I’m very thankful for having been there. My previous encounters with the species had always been at a greater distance and these guys aren’t really very big for their details to pop from a distance. These guys can also be visibly wary of safari vahicles which, she was not and that helped a great deal with the images. It was a gorgeous sighting of a beautiful female Jackal to start off the proceedings at Pobitora and that really set the mood very well for the rest of the afternoon.

Golden Jackals range from the Himalayan foothills to the rest of India. In fact, they did so well in India that the species slowly expanded its range to reach Europe through Western Asia. People knew and heeded the call of the Jackal well in the past. Every culture from here to Persia and beyond has folk lore that includes tales of the sly and clever Jackal. Today, people go their entire lives without having heard the famous call of the Jackal and that has as much to do with Human expansion as it does with the Jackal’s slyness, I think. You see wild dogs like Dhole cannot mate with Indian domestic dogs who evolved from Pariah Dogs as they cannot handle the mix. Things that don’t make Pariah Dogs ill kill the Dhole. Jackals on the other hand, can breed with Pariah Dogs. Life in the limited wilderness available these days is difficult for such a small scavenger and they have predators like big cats in the limited reserved parks. I think that the Jackal has probably entered our streets on the sly and we don’t even know it cause interbreeding between Jackals and Pariah Dogs probably changed the sound and nature of their howls along with much else and we just didn’t notice the gradual change. If you visit any rural human settlement in India today, you’ll see that the strays in India howl every night and that howl is not much unlike the howl that I just heard in Pobitora last month. It’s not the same but not too different either. In fact, Pariah Dogs and Jackals both howl as a means of communication and they aren’t actually howling at the moon. They’re sharing news with their buddies and both the species usually sport the same colours as well. Could it be then that the brown Indian stray that we find all over the subcontinent is also the Jackal? My guess is that in some part, it probably is the Golden Jackal and Pariah Dog together who have modernised just like us. We’re just starting to investigate the mixing of the Indian Pariah Dogs and Golden Jackals as far as science is concerned and I’m sure that it’s not on anyone’s immediate to do list cause it’s an obvious uphill slope for limited reward. You don't see Golden Jackals out and about in most of the reserves in the country of their origin anymore and yet, even today I woke up to read an article about how a Golden Jackal was "rescued" from the outskirts of Bangalore. Stiff competition for resources has driven them out of the reserves to scavenge around our settlements where they were just bound to run into Pariah Dogs who are genetically similar to them. There's no census and no historical population data of both the species. We just know that they are of "Least Concern" and not endangered. Of course they mixed and moved in man. Their cousins taught em all the ropes of the trade and why not? It's evolution baby !

See my girl with the happy face in Pic : 3 ? That’s the little animal that our ancestors wrote as many tales about as they did about the mythical Dragons. These guys are not large or scary by themselves by any yardstick. They get upto 100 cm in length and can weight around 12 Kgs or so. For such a small carnivore to be written about as much as this species has and for it to have spread throughout three continents, it surely had a lot going in it’s favour at the time and I will get to all that for sure in my next post about them. My unexpected discovery of these guys in Pobitora though, ended up getting me physically closer to them than it would have ever been possible in a reserve like Ranthambore where they are also seen. The bigger reserves are just not built for it cause the roads are wider, there’s a lot more traffic and the presence of larger predators like Tigers makes the environment there different to say the least. The Golden jackal has no predators in Pobitora and that’s just the kind of environment that our Wild Dogs probably need at this time. It was wonderful to see these gorgeous creatures getting a chance to live as they should and with the freedom to do so. Pobitora, like Jhalana in Rajasthan is a brilliant concept in conservation to not only manage wildlife in close proximity to a city but to also educate and familiarize Humans. Thanks to this beautiful spot by the river, I now probably know where I’m taking my son to first when he is ready to learn how much hard discipline it actually takes to truly be wild and I can’t wait. Might take a while for him yet I guess, but maybe that's just chance for me to get to know the Jackals here a little better as well.

The next post is going to be about another forest dweller who has moved into the city having discovered the benefits of urban life like so many of us. The Dark Knight has arisen in all of our towns and cities in India and I'll tell you all about him next week. See you then.