Black-backed jackal

The black-backed jackal, in Afrikaans rooijakkals (red jackal) and scientifically Canis mesomelas, is active day or night, more nocturnal where people are around and often seen on the move at dawn or dusk.

These jackals are effective hunters, causing them to be found widespread in southern Africa. Lions and the like may leave some food when sated, opportunities for scavengers like the black-backed jackal. Leftovers constitute a simplified way of finding food, often complicated by the danger of being attacked over dinner. They also occur where there are no big predators and have to hunt themselves. This jackal is only absent from tropical rain forests.

Hunters of small prey like the lambs of antelope, the black-backed jackal is quite an omnivore, eating rodents, insects, wild fruit, hyraxes, hares and birds, also seal cubs where living at the coast.

Incidents are known of a single black-back bringing down a mature impala or springbok, chasing its prey to exhaustion. Antelope targets increase in size when the jackals hunt in pairs or packs, dramatically improving their success rate. Distress signals from the hunted animal alert more jackals to join the fray, increasing the success rate while decreasing the share of the spoils per participant from each hunt.

After the springbok rut season, injured rams from losing fights with their counterparts become targets of packs of jackals. Hunting in pairs, while periodic hunting packs do form, twelve or even twenty may occur near big herds of suitable prey.

Pack numbers do wonders for ambition regarding the size of the targets hunted, without implying great jackal skills at counting partners or blessings. At the other end of the style or strategy range, a Kalahari black-back has been observed catching around 35 mice in three hours, failing in only about one in four attempts.

The black-backed jackal will occasionally catch a python when finding it lethargic from recent feeding and unable to defend itself. At other times the hunter may, of course, become the hunted, python eating rather than tasting jackal. (Swallowing a hairy meal whole cant do much for relishing ones food.)

Hunters targeting weakest animals serve to improve the gene pool of the hunted species, also for reducing if not eradicating disease among prey. Maybe some victims are also poor at counting their blessings.

Birds? The black-backed jackal will charge flocks at drinking places, grabbing the slowest in take-off.

Nothing of this endears the black-backed jackal to sheep farmers who often succeed in reducing their numbers in farming areas. People with no interest in stock farming tend to feel differently about the black-back, may describe it as cute (Riëtte, 2016).