There is a small village Veesma about 60 km from Udaipur city, Rajasthan. Uncultivable enclosed land is called a Beed in Mewar. On 13^th June 1995, I was crossing a Beed near this village when I spotted a Jackal at 6.10 PM.

I was near a Babool (Acacia nilotica) tree. Cautiously I crouched behind the tree to observe the jackal. There was scanty vegetation in this Beed. Apart from seven Babool trees there were a few bushes, mostly of Zizyphus species.

The jackal slowly and carefully moved diagonally away from me. It stopped near a very small bush about 50m from me. Some excavated fresh soil was visible from my position and I guessed that it might have been a burrow of some rat.

The jackal started moving around the bush in a haphazard way sniffing the ground. After 10 min of this reconnaissance it stopped near the excavated mound of earth and urinated there. Suddenly it dashed towards my tree.

As I followed its movements, I saw that there was a burrow between two bushes about 30m from me and from this burrow two pups of the jackal emerged. The female jackal rushed towards them and pushed them back into the burrow. Again it went to the place and started excavating earth beyond the small bush. After excavating the earth it again refilled it with its hind legs.

In this way it dug the earth at five different places near the bush and refilled them. After a pause of 3 min it moved to the place where it had urinated and started digging the earth frantically. After sometime it disappeared into the burrow.

After a while it emerged from the burrow, hind quarters first, with something in its mouth and moved towards the burrow where its pups were. I could make out that it was carrying a dead rat and from coloration I can reasonably say that it was a Metad (Millardia meltada).

It entered its own burrow again, moved towards the freshly excavated burrow and picked up another rat. In this fashion it removed three grown up and two young rats and deposited them in the burrow or fed them to its pups.

I came out of the hiding and examined the area well. The jackal had ascertained the most often used hole of the rat colony. It blocked the hole by urinating over it. Apparently the smell of fresh urine of the jackal kept the rats from using this hole for escape.

The jackal found the alternative holes of escape and after excavating partially and refilling them, it plugged all the escape routes. It then excavated the main entrance, reached the chamber and killed the rats. The whole episode took 43 min.

Published in Journal of Bombay Natural History Society:

Tehsin, R. H. (1996) Rat Killing By A Jackal (Canis aureus). J. Bom. Nat. Hist. Soc. 93(2): 286