The secrets of the Golden Jackal Alphabet

The Golden Jackal repertoire

by Ovidiu C. Banea

Golden Jackal talks, vocalizations, and even the "letters of the songs" the species plays during the night are now closer to being known by humans.

Eurasian Golden Jackal

Canis aureus moreoticus (Geoffroy, 1835)

Photo: Ovidiu C. Banea, January 2023

Briefly, the sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid, or solid. Acoustic waves that have frequencies lying between about 20 Hz and 20 kHz, the audio frequency range, elicit an auditory percept in humans. Sound waves above 20 kHz are known as ultrasound and are not audible to humans. Sound waves below 20 Hz are known as infrasound. Different animal species have varying hearing ranges.

Herz is the measure of frequency and 1Hz means 1 cycle/second (time unit).

During the Kerkini Jackal Week meeting, Biologist Uthpala Jayaweera and Professor in Zoology Sampath Seneviratne from the University of Colombo showed the participants sonograms of the Sri Lankan Golden Jackal subspecies - Canis aureus naria (Wroughton, 1916) recorded howls and suggested that the "alphabet" has 23 syllables forming 5 vocalization types.

Sri Lankan Golden Jackal

Canis aureus naria (Wroughton, 1916)

Photo: Charles J. Sharp, February 2022

But one of the most interesting aspects is that some of the Golden Jackal emitted sounds are perceived by us with a range between 500 and 2500 Hz. Even more, there are patterns of "singing jackals" that can be reproduced by humans.

by Biologist Uthpala Jataweera

Janka Durova (Slovakia), Sampath Seneviratne (Sri Lanka), 

Uthpala Jataweera (Sri Lanka), and Ovidiu C. Banea (Romania)

at Kerkini village, Greece (28.10.2023)

After a brief introduction to the spectral analysis of golden jackals sustained by Prof Seneviratne

Professor in zoology Sampath Seneviratne

Sonograms of the golden jackals were studied in Europe by Laszlo Szabo from Hungary (2009-2011), and by sound Engineer Carlo Comazzi (2015) in Italy. 

Source: Carlo Comazzi, Silvana Mattiello, Olivier Friard, Stefano Filacorda & Marco Gamba (2016): Acoustic monitoring of golden jackals in Europe: setting the frame for future analyses, Bioacoustics, DOI: 10.1080/09524622.2016.1152564

In Romania, the first sonograms were analyzed by Carlo Comazzi using recordings from "Danubius Jackal Camp" 2017, a wildlife survey organized in the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve.

Spectral analysis of wild canid chorus was also used in wolves and the technique was suggested as an important tool complementary to other methods during the monitoring of the species. "Compared with other monitoring techniques (i.e., genetic analysis), bioacoustic analysis requires widely available informatics tools (i.e., sound recording set of devices and sound analysis software) and a low budget. Information obtained by means of chorus analysis can also be combined with that provided by other techniques. Moreover, howls can be recorded and stored in an audio file format with a good resolution (i.e. in “Wave” format), thus representing a useful tool for future listening and investigations, which can be countlessly employed without risks of time deterioration." Passilongo et al, 2015.

Wolves chorus spectral analysis (sonograms), Passilongo et al, 2015.

Source: Visualizing sound: counting wolves by using a spectral view of the chorus howling | Frontiers in Zoology | Full Text (biomedcentral.com) 

Spectral analyses of golden jackal howlings: 24th of October - 4th of November 2023

Wilde canids "singing" at Kerkini Lake

Red fox and Golden Jackal yip-howl ending of a specific howl followed by new linear vocalization

One or two golden jackal individuals chorus

Recording of a Golden Jackal territorial group. The low-frequency trace indicated a bigger size specimen. In the area wolves are present.

Two human voices imitating a jackal chorus

Comparative analysis between Golden Jackal howlings and human voices imitating the jackals

Hunting and spectral analysis of Golden Jackal chorus

The spectral analysis of wild canids shows different patterns if golden jackals are aggressively hunted with shot individuals almost every day, how occurred in the past at a waste dump in Trpanj (Croatia), where jackals replied from different angles at the same time during 2 minutes, with ununiform howlings and disorganized pattern. When there is NO Hunting or poaching, the Golden Jackal communicating behavior and territorial responses are organized with a consequent reply from every group with a total average of 27-35 seconds duration / each jackal chorus,

Master Thesis in Italy, Francesca Nemola: Golden jackal BAM and behavioral analysis in Danube Delta

Acoustic monitoring and Behavioral Analysis of the golden jackal (Canis aureus) in Danube Delta MScThesis

by Francesca Nemola, MSc

ABSTRACT

In a context like the European one, where the population of golden jackal (Canis aureus) is increasing, my work is intended to provide starting points for the development of new non-invasive monitoring methods to combine with existing ones, for the census of natural populations. The data for the study were collected in Ultima Frontiera Reserve in Romania. 

The work (HERE) focused on four aspects: 

• confirm the presence of golden jackals, through induced howling technique; 
• evaluate the potential for estimating the number of individuals, by counting from sonogram; 
• evaluate the potential for recognition of species, through semi-automatic techniques for the bio-acoustic analysis; 
• analyze the behavior of the golden jackal in Romania, in an artificial feeding context. 

Credit: Carlo Comazzi

Data on the presence of jackals were obtained through jackal howling technique; in particular we have seen how individual animals have responded more than groups. These findings have led to the supposition that animals who responded, were animals satellites belonging to a large pack; additional data to test this hypothesis are still needed. Counting the certain minimum number of individuals from the sonogram, was performed on recordings collected in the Reserve, and the resulting estimate was compared with the number of individuals estimated by the operator in the field. It was found that when the number of vocalizing animals was higher than two, counting from sonogram underestimated the number of individuals compared to the estimate in the field. This discrepancy is due to characteristics of howling and to the distance of the animal. For the bio acoustic analysis we have used the first and second howl of several species of jackals and Canis lupus. In particular, two data sets have been processed in order to obtain the dissimilarity index between the different howls through dynamic time warping, one containing the files with the original duration and the other containing the files with standardized duration. On the matrix of the acoustic distances produced it was then applied a clustering algorithm based on the similarity between given pairs of points. The results obtained from bio acoustical analyses, highlight the importance of geographical and ecological differences of the populations and species considered, besides the importance of the duration of individual howls related to body size. In any case further analysis are necessary using a larger sample and the whole howling of considered species. The videos for behavioral analysis were collected in areas with feeding points refilled regularly. Their analysis has resulted in the frequency of behaviors and their transitions. The highest frequencies were found “for body bent down” and vigilance behaviors, and for some of the combinations that contained them. The significant sequences, contained threat behaviors. These suggest that the presence of con-specific and birds at the feeding point, can bother the jackal that feeds. Behavioral analysis showed that, in all probability the vigilance of the golden jackal in the study area is due to the presence of con-specific and birds that can steal food; based on this, it would be interesting to see if the vigilance of the animal that feeds in the presence of other animals increases and if this increase can lead to chronic stress that can affect the fitness of the jackals present in the study area.