In the eyes of the members of Boldy’s family – and principally of the three senior adults – anyone using the bait-site besides them was a trespasser. The Old Man had made the bait-site for them and them alone – they were the chosen tribe. (In truth, the old man made the bait-site and they were the first to discover it as they lived nearest. But they preferred to take the ‘chosen tribe’ view).
From this perspective, the hedgehogs and the badgers were the ones with whom Boldy’s family agreed to share the bait-site. Particularly with the badgers with whom important services were traded (housing for sentrying - more about it in the previous post). In respect of other visitors to the bait-site, attitudes varied widely. Some were afraid of the jackals and used the bait-site surreptitiously. Others the jackals themselves were afraid of. Still others avoided the bait-site not for fear of the jackals, but of the human around the place. Possibly there were other cases. It could well be that we were observing only a small part of the ever-changing political kaleidoscope of the place. But let us say a few words about those arrangements of which we had some idea.
The rodents (Black rats and Field mice) preferred to keep clear of the jackals for obvious reasons (not wanting to get eaten). They waited in their tree and in other nooks and corners until the jackals vacated the stage. Only then they would dare to dart down to the bowl, snatch some invisible bit, and vanish.
Jackals, on their part, were not easy with snakes (might get bitten). The wildcat sent fear all around – no one was in the mind of playing with her.
The other chance visitors were foxes, stray dogs, and stray cats. The two last may have gone feral – i.e., living entirely in the wild. All these animals visited furtively the bait-site, but for each one of them, not more than a handful of visits had been registered over an average season of a hundred days. This could be seen to mean that they tried hard to avoid meeting the jackals.
The wild pigs presented a special case. My father occasionally came across them when their small herds were roaming the fields above the bluff. During the heat of the day, they hid in densely overgrown gulleys – the place of now abandoned vineyard plots (of these last later on). But in the evening, the big and powerful animals went down to the river to drink water and wallow in the bluish strip of mud along parts of the river-edge. They could be visually seen doing that not far from the camp. Besides, their nightly presence could be seen well-printed on the soft mud by the water-edge.
A question arose: why didn’t the pigs go marauding at the bait-site?
That was indeed puzzling as with their size and might the thought of them being afraid of the jackals could be ruled out without hesitation. The cows of the herd that grazed the wild land above the bluff did not have any compunctions about eating the bait-site pile of oats. (More about that herd will be said in further stories.) True, the cows had done it only a couple of times, but it was still a fact.
The cow-herd visited the campsite quite often during the summers of ’23 and ’24. My father’s solar panels – his all-important source of energy – were in grave danger then, lying as they were in the middle of the camp ‘square’. But the massive creatures stepped like ballerinas in between the panels and other pieces of equipment lying on the ground. They never did any harm – save for eating some of the slices of bread drying in the sun.
With the wild pigs it was different – they never entered the square, keeping themselves at a safe distance from the tent. Evidently, they were careful not to risk a shot from that direction. By now, richer hunters have come to use infra-red optical equipment for night vision. The very intelligent wild pigs have quickly got wise of the technological improvement and were taking precautions. The answer to their refraining from marauding the bait-site oats must have been lying there. It was too close to the tent.
With that the list of competitors from other species was exhausted. There were other small animals: martens, squirrels, weasels, but they were never seen at the bait-site. Those who remained were of the jackals’ own – trespassers from neighbouring jackal families.
The neighbours.
My father had estimated that there were at least three neighbouring families. There was one operating downriver, close to the cluster of shacks by the fishing port of Stanevo, another – a kilometre upriver, and a third closer to the village. A few words will be said about each. Before that it should be emphasized that jackals are long-legged and fast-moving creatures for whom to clock up an overnight’s foraging route of some thirty kilometers would be just a well-done nightly job. Still, while jackals would scour the terrain far and wide, there would usually be a central resource, which a family would like to be close to. Among other concerns, a family wanted to have secure day cover, and a nearby water source. If there was also a stable, high-yielding resource, which they would be able to keep for themselves, the arrangement could be considered as near to perfection as possible.
My father’s bait-site at Km 727 satisfied all three conditions.
The neighbouring family three kilometres downriver was well-positioned as regarded the first two conditions: cover and water. The third – a focal resource – was not as dependable as the bait-site, but still of serious interest.
This resource was the waste-dumps around the cluster of shacks, caravans, and trailers which represented a kind of a villa-zone of the village. Fishermen kept their boats and tackle here, as well as have communal week-end feasts close by the river.
As no sanitation existed or anything like garbage-collection, the place offered interesting opportunities.
Side-by-side with the shacks and trailers of the local fishermen stood a small hotel with a restaurant and a swimming pool. This was an ambitious project of a businessman from Sofia which attracted a stream of visitors during the summer.
The fishing-port jackal family were not indifferent to the recreational wonders that the Villa offered (see what’s on the grill). When the Danube mackerel season was opened in the second half of May, swarms of town anglers descended. As said before, their common efforts created fabulous dumps by the fishing port, close to the Villa. The jackal family hosting those riches my father called the Pomodiana Family.
Then there was the upriver group, at Km 728. That was only a kilometre from my father’s camp. The family’s cover was the impenetrable thicket into which a now disused country road had turned. Both the Pomodiana family and the one at Km 728 could be located when howling matches between the various groups of the river-bank took place. Howling, or more broadly – vocalization – is a big theme with jackals which will be treated in its own right further on in the posts.
The family with their base at Km 728, worked the bank all the way upriver to Km 732 and beyond. During the summer, the sand beach at Km 732 would be used by villagers of Kovachitsa. The place was called Topolite (The Poplars) and was a favourite picnicking and camping site. Villagers and their visitors from towns – relatives and friends – went to the beach for sun-bathing and swimming, as well as for celebrating religious festivals. The great village festival of 2 August (Ilinden, St. Elias Day) was celebrated there. The shade of the old poplars, giving the name of the place, invited recreational campers, some staying all through the summer. Upwards of thirty family tents could be seen there in July and August.
But all those were human affairs. From the jackals’ point of view what mattered was what humans left when the day was over. A minor trouble was that what they left was mostly in plastic bags. However, all animals who depended on waste had learned to deal with plastic bags: by breaking them open, or simply eating through them (to save time). When zoologists studied stomach content of jackals – victims of roadkill or shot dead by hunters –torn plastic would be well represented. Despite this nuisance, the waste strewn around at Topolite made an attractive and stable resource all through the summer. Although based at Km 728, my father called them the Topolite family as the camping site constituted their focal resource.
Besides Pomodiana and Topolite, there was another family with their main resource at the industrial vineyard, situated close to the village. As said before, the village waste-bins did not have much to offer. Villagers threw out only inedible stuff – like empty plastic bottles or bags. Edible organic matter went for the household pig, poultry, dog, and cats. There was little promise in those bins (if any). More could be hoped for from the vineyard.
The vineyard was about a square kilometer in size. Roughly romboid in shape, it began from the last houses of Stanevo, and stretched all the way down to the fishing port, Villa Pomodiana, and the ‘villa zone’ of the fishermen.
The ad of the owners (Rubin Stanevo Ltd.) deserves a close look. As it can be seen in the photo above, there is a dirt-road on the left of the picture. It begins from the last houses of the village and goes all the way down to the bank at Km 726. This road can be considered to constitute the border between the foraging territory of my father’s bait-site family (Boldy’s), and the Pomodiana by the fishing port (Km 723).
On the right of the photo there is another road. A little over a kilometre long, it connects Stanevo with the fishing port. This road can be considered to be another border-line. Beyond it to the east and downriver there are jackal families, foraging one after the other, the land of the Danube banks. One might say: all the way from the Black Sea to Germany (and beyond).
The jackals downriver from the fishing-port road could be of some concern to the Pomodiana, and the Vineyard families, but too far to bother about by Boldy’s. When my father drives down to Stanevo on his four-wheel bike, he occasionally meets a jackal running down the road in broad daylight. Such careless strollers (usually juniors) would belong to the ‘Eastern families’ (Pomodiana and Vineyard). My father claimed that he never met anyone from Boldy’s on these roads.
The vineyard was ploughed, sprayed, and fertilized with tractors and other machinery, but all the rest of the numerous manipulations was done by hand (sapling-cutting, binding, bird-scaring, harvesting, etc.). Those were done by day labourers who were hired from the village, particularly at the time of the grape-harvest. That last began already in the second part of August and carried on well into October.
That was a time of great interest for all jackal families. On the one hand, there were the ripening grapes which were eaten with relish (as also by badgers). Then there was the waste which the day labourers – mostly Roma women – left behind. The labourers had their lunches right between the rows, where leftover scraps of food would be left. All that was carefully taken care of by the jackals at night. When one went in the morning, only cigarette butts, empty cigarette boxes, and plastic bottles could be seen here and there.
Finally, there was the flat cultivated land between the two villages. In form and size, that was a rectangular area of some four by six kilometres, i.e., an extensive plot of around 24 square kilometres. This land belonged to the agricultural company BOMAR TRADE Ltd., the biggest actor on the local terrain. My father’s friends among the tractor drivers told him that they often saw jackals walking behind the tractors in broad daylight. Together with flocks of gulls, ravens, and storks, they foraged for anything edible that the huge ploughs brought to the surface, mostly worms and insects.
In pre-harvest time, the fields offered nesting-places for birds and the jackals were certainly interested in that. As also in the roadkill that the asphalt road, connecting Stanevo with Kovachitsa and beyond, offered. Occasionally, the jackals themselves could be the victims.
The northern side of the vast rectangle of the fields – mostly of wheat, maize, and sunflower – is the rim of a nearly vertical slope with a drop of some thirty to fifty metres. This is the first of the three slopes that gradually bring the land down to the river. The last one of them is the bluff behind my father’s tent.
We can see in Fig. 9 how the land lies and the choices of base locations the four families have made. Their primary concerns are the dense forested and bush area from the edge of cultivation all the way down to the river. This provides dependable day cover. Within this strip, practically impenetrable for humans, they prefer home spots close to the river, so they get drinking water without great trouble. These are also the places where the birthing dens are dug into the soft loess faces of the last bluff, possibly in cooperation with badgers.
From the four bases the families begin their nightly forays over the hinterland. The four families of a total of 35-40 jackals, would be thus foraging in an area of over 30 sq.km in size. The entire foraging area of a family could thus be supposed to be as big as 7.5 sq. km. Their core parts, where an attractive stable resource constitutes a focal centre, would be much smaller and at least half of that.
It can be well-imagined that trespassing into such core family territories, inevitably occurs. How that looks in the case of Boldy’s family territory, whose focal centre is the bait-site by my father’s tent, we’ll tell you in the next story.
