The golden jackal moves northFrom the lower Danube into every county of Romania, and across Europe past the Arctic Circle

Where did the golden jackal live before 1970?#

In the middle of the last century the golden jackal lived in Europe only in a few corners of the Balkans: on the Strandja coast where Bulgaria meets Turkey, in Dalmatia, in the Peloponnese, and between the Struma valley and Chalkidiki. That is how the zoologists Nikolai Spassov and Ilya Acosta-Pankov describe it in a 2019 reconstruction.

Romania, across the Danube from Bulgaria, saw it only now and then. It was reported in Dobruja, Romania’s strip of land between the lower Danube and the Black Sea, in the 1920s, and on the Danube bank opposite the Bulgarian town of Lom in 1929. In 1954 jackals were seen near Craiova and Călărași in the south, and near Piatra Neamț and Focșani in the north-east. In the 1960s the jackal vanished from many places in the Balkans, through habitat loss and poisoned bait.

In 1962 Bulgaria banned poisoned bait and protected the jackal. From there the strongest expansion set off, north and west. It was back in Romanian Dobruja by the early 1970s.

Which counties began reporting jackals last?#

In 2014, 30 of Romania’s 41 counties reported jackals. The other 11 began listing them between 2015 and 2019, all in central, northern and eastern Romania (Transylvania, Maramureș and Moldavia): Bacău, Botoșani, Brașov and Hunedoara in 2015; Cluj and Suceava in 2016; Covasna and Maramureș in 2017; Bistrița-Năsăud and Neamț in 2018; Sălaj in 2019.

The first year in a table is not the first sighting. Two jackals were shot at Voroneț in Suceava in 1970, and one was killed at Cricău in Alba in 2007, according to the 2012 paper by Ovidiu Banea and colleagues.

In the spring of 2026 Mehedinți had the most jackals per 100 km² (51.1) and Suceava the fewest (1.6).

Could anyone have foreseen when the jackal would multiply in a county?#

The first idea is a front advancing at a steady speed. Then the distance from the counties where jackals were already common in 2014 should tell the year they become as common in the others.

The test hid the years after 2018 and asked each method to guess them. Across the 10 counties for which both methods gave a forecast, the median absolute error was 3.8 years for the steady front, usually too early, and 1.9 years for each county’s own trend until then, extended. In 36 of 38 versions of the test (another density threshold, another cut-off year, estimates or animals shot), the county’s trend had the smaller median absolute error.

The test does not show how the jackal moved inside a county: a county total cannot tell a front passing through it from growth in place. It shows only that, in the counties where both could be compared, a county’s own numbers forecast better than the distance.

The wanderers come first, the pups later#

The double ring marks the first pups documented in a country. Between the first confirmed jackal and the first pups there were 20 years in Austria (1987 and 2007), 24 in Germany (1997 and 2021), 11 in Czechia (2006 and 2017) and one in Italy (1984 and 1985). In Poland and Estonia breeding was reported in the same year as the first record (2015 and 2013).

In Norway, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, France and Spain, breeding had not been confirmed in the sources read. In France a young female killed on a road in 2023 suggested pups born there, without confirmation.

One pace does not fit: Norway’s first jackal was photographed almost two decades before the predicted year#

Plot the 11 countries with first records up to 2015 (leaving out Slovenia, where the sources point mainly to jackals from the Adriatic population) against their distance from the Strandja coast, and a straight line gives a pace of about 50 km a year. Asked to guess the 5 countries with first records after 2015, the line has a median absolute error of 6.7 years (7.4 if distance is measured from the Iron Gates of the Danube).

The line predicts Norway’s first record in 2038; the jackal was photographed at Lakselv in 2019, 19 years earlier. France’s first record came later than the line said, Spain’s close to the predicted year.

The same as with Romania’s counties, at the scale of a continent: the year the first jackal turns up in a place cannot be read from a single speed.

Why open databases draw the spread wrongly#

The blue dots are the 2,576 jackal records on this map held by GBIF, the public database that gathers sightings from apps such as iNaturalist, museum collections and national atlases.

In Romania the records kept here cover only 11 of 41 counties. In the other 30, where hunters reported jackals shot in these years, the GBIF extract used here has no jackal at all.

A test on 50 km squares: in each square with a recorded jackal, was there a year with at least three fox records at least five years before? In the jackal’s new countries, yes, in 67% of squares: there the first jackal in the database follows years in which people were recording animals. In the old range, from Romania to Greece, only 5% of squares meet the condition: there the first jackal in the database cannot date its arrival. With other thresholds the share stays below 38% in the old range and above 51% in the new. Even in the new countries, a record does not prove the exact year of arrival.

Do wolves keep the golden jackal away?#

A common explanation: the jackal spread where people wiped out the wolf. Miha Krofel and colleagues showed in 2017 that the jackal’s range overlapped the wolf’s on 7.1% of it in 1950–1970 and on 22.7% after 2000, and that in seven of eight places where wolves returned, jackals disappeared or moved to the edge of the wolves’ territory.

Across Romania’s counties the test cannot decide. Wolves live in the mountains, and the share of a county inside the wolf range reported to the EU for 2019–2024 goes almost hand in hand with the county’s mean height (correlation 0.94). Counties with more of their area in the reported wolf range have a lower estimated jackal density (correlation -0.56), but so do the highest ones; with the linear link to mean height removed, the correlation left is -0.02. A comparison by county cannot tell the effect of wolves from that of the mountains.

Krofel’s study areas measured 110 to 450 km². A Romanian county averages 5,808 km².

The official map sent to the European Union#

Every six years Romania reports to the European Commission, on 10 km squares, where the species of the Habitats Directive live, the jackal among them. Its map covers 14% of the country in the report for 2007–2012 and 80% in the report for 2019–2024.

The map in the report for 2013–2018 does not fit the others. It puts the jackal in the Carpathians and Transylvania and leaves out Dobruja, Dolj and Olt, where hunters were then shooting hundreds a year. The wolf map in the same report lies wholly inside it; the two differ by 2,400 km².

The documents reviewed do not explain the difference. The list of corrections published for Romania’s report does not mention the jackal.

Golden jackals near you#

Type a town or click the map. For a town in Romania: how many jackals hunters estimated in its county each spring since 2014 and how many were shot. For anywhere in Europe: the 10 km square in 2012–2016, the nearest open record and the nearest first record of a country.

You can also click the map directly.