Lupulella mesomelas
Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Maasai Mara National Reserve, aggregated onto a 10 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.
Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.
Records exist for August, with the widest coverage in August. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 19 squares of 10 km carry records for Black-backed Jackal in and around Maasai Mara National Reserve, and the 12 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.
If the bush has a wit, it is the black-backed jackal: a fox-sized canid wearing a silver-black saddle, common from the Skeleton Coast to the Kalahari and entirely unbothered by our opinion of it. Jackals mate for life, defend small family territories, and run an omnivorous portfolio that stretches from beetles to newborn springbok to the edges of a lion kill, where they dart in with a courage completely out of scale with their eight kilograms. On the coast they patrol seal colonies like commuters. Their evening chorus, a rising, yammering wail passed from pair to pair across the veld, is one of the definitive sounds of a Namibian night.
Never feed jackals at camps; a food-conditioned jackal becomes a problem animal with a short future.