When you scan the starkly beautiful landscape of Ethiopia's highlands, one of the first things you notice is the vegetation.
Howling winds ensure that few plants grow high off the ground here, with giant (familiar from gardens around the world) among the few exceptions. In these mountains, it's pretty bleak at the best of times. But, if you study the windswept Afro-alpine terrain through binoculars, there's a surprise in store.
Look closer and the ground seems to be moving: it's alive with scampering rodents. At 3,000-4,000m above sea level, the highlands are an unforgiving environment for many animals, but small burrowing mammals thrive.
The dozen or so species found here, from grass and brush-furred rats to the giant mole rat, are the main food source for the wonderfully charismatic endemic predator that visitors are likely to spot next: the Ethiopian wolf.
What is an Ethiopian wolf?
The Ethiopian wolf is a slim, long-legged canid with a mainly russet coat, a white belly, chest and chin, and a dark, bushy tail.
It's is a lanky, russet-coated carnivore confined to a tiny range in the Horn of Africa, and is one of the rarest members of the dog family.
Other names for Ethiopian wolf
The Ethiopian wolf (canis simensis) goes by several other names: simien fox, simien jackal, Ethiopian jackal, abyssinian wolf, red jackal and cuberow.
What do Ethiopian wolf look like?
The Ethiopian wolf resembles a coyote in size and shape, Its white-on-rusty-red markings become more defined with age and status.
Where do Ethiopian wolves live?
The preferred habitats of Ethiopian wolves are grasslands and heathlands at altitudes over 3,000m.
What do Ethiopian wolves eat?
The Ethiopian wolf's diet consists mainly of rodents such as giant mole, grass, vlei rats and brush-furred rats. They also eat Ethiopian highland hares, goose eggs and carrion.
How do they catch rats?
Ethiopian wolves have a number of rodent-catching techniques, the most common being stalking. They creep forwards low to the ground to blend in with the brush, advancing in a series of short bursts until close enough to pounce. Wolves also use rocks or bushes as cover to leap on unsuspecting rats, or dig rodents out of their tunnels - this is their favourite method for catching mole rats, and may lead to the destruction of an entire burrow.
They sometimes follow herds of goats or cattle, mingling with the livestock so that the animals act as a kind of mobile hide, concealing the wolves' approach.
What are its predators?
The wolves are at the top of the food chain in these isolated uplands, there is little direct persecution by local people, and prey remains relatively plentiful.
What's the difference between the grey wolf and Ethiopian wolf?
There's one key difference between this wolf and its much wider-ranging northern relative: because it is a specialist predator with a predilection for burrowing rats, rather than an opportunist pack hunter partial to the odd sheep or goat, it doesn't pose any threat to livestock.
The Ethiopian wolf hardly ever takes prey as large as lambs, because it hunts as a group very rarely. So while persecution is the main threat to the grey wolf, it's far down the list of dangers facing its cousin. With local people on side and the vaccination project expanding, the future of the world's rarest dog is looking brighter at last.
How big are Ethiopian wolves?
They weigh up to 19.5kg, with a head and body measuring between 84-101cm, and a tail of 27-40cm.
How long do Ethiopian wolves live?
The Ethiopian wolf (canis simensis) typically lives for 7-9 years, and up to 12 years in captivity.
What's their life cycle – and how do they give birth?
The Ethiopian wolf sexually matures at two years. Female gives birth to 2-6 pups between October-January after a 60-day gestation.
A female Ethiopian wolf gives birth in a den, usually in a rocky crevice or under a boulder. At first the pups are blind, lack teeth and have sparsely furred, dark grey or black coats. They start moulting into their adult coloration when they emerge from the den after three weeks. They depend on their mother for milk until they are three to four weeks old and ready to leave the den. Over the following six weeks the pups survive on milk, supplemented by meat regurgitated by the adults in the pack.
The youngsters practise hunting skills such as stalking and pouncing by playing with older pack members.
At 10 weeks of age they are weaned off milk and survive entirely on meat provided by the adults. By the time they are six months old they must be able to hunt for themselves, joining adults on hunting patrols.
What are the relatives of Ethiopian wolves?
The Ethiopian wolf's preference for hunting alone is one reason why the species was long mistaken for a jackal or fox - it was not confirmed beyond doubt as a relative of the grey wolf until the 1990's. Advances in mitochondrial DNA sequencing have since led to another exciting discovery: we now know that there are not one but two wolves in North East Africa. The other species, formally named in 2011, is a pale, equally slender canid called the African wolf, which was formerly considered a subspecies of the golden jackal.
The closest living relatives of both these wolf species appear to be the grey wolves of India and the Himalayas.
So how did the Ethiopian wolf arrive in the Horn of Africa?
One theory is that a common ancestor of today's grey and Ethiopian wolves travelled south from Eurasia, made it to the Great Rift Valley and stopped – then began moving up into the region's highlands. Rodents are the most abundant mammalian prey at these altitudes, so the wolf evolved to be smaller and leaner, with a longer snout for snatching rats as they retreat into their burrows, and its coloration shifted to a rusty hue that matched the summer ground cover.
Is it a lone wolf?
Though the Ethiopian wolf is primarily a solitary hunter, it has not lost all the social tendencies of its pack-forming northern cousins. Ethiopian wolves also form tight-knit groups, containing between three and a dozen adults, with a clear hierarchy. Their social bonds are maintained by ritualised greetings and gentle sparring. Pack members all help to raise new litters of pups and share the job of 3 defending their territorial borders against other packs.
Status of Ethiopian wolf
Endangered.
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How many Ethiopian wolves are left in the world?
The IUCN estimates there are fewer than 400 adult Ethiopian wolves left in the wild
Why is the Ethiopian wolf endangered?
If they have plenty of prey and are at the top of the food chain, why then do fewer than 400 adult members of the species survive?
In fact, the problems faced by these canids are similar to those threatening many other large carnivores in Africa.
The wolves share their alpine ecosystem with herders for whom goats and cattle represent more of a status symbol than a source of food or income. As the human population increases, the area grazed by domestic animals encroaches further into the wolves' habitat. Moreover, overgrazing and compaction of the earth by all those hoofs reduces numbers of their rodent prey.
The threat from herders' dogs
But there is another, more pressing threat that arrived with the herders. Their dogs, used mostly as an alarm system against nocturnal attacks by leopards and spotted hyenas, are semi-feral. They are not spayed or neutered, nor vaccinated, and are left to their own devices to find food and water. Unfortunately, this means that they head for the hills to hunt the same rodent prey as the wolves.
The herders' dogs carry two diseases that readily pass to the wolves: rabies and canine distemper virus (CDV).
Coming into contact with infected dogs, or even with the remains of infected animals, often results in death – not just for one wolf, but for the entire population in that area. If a pack member picks up rabies, it can spread to the rest of its group in a matter of days. And if that pack meets other wolves during its morning patrol of territory boundaries, the disease infects those groups, too.
Why the Ethiopian wolf is important to the ecosystem
Protecting this handsome canid means protecting the habitat in which it lives, and protecting the Ethiopian highlands does more than simply boost the odds of this long-limbed carnivore surviving into the second half of this century: it also safeguards the primary water source for 85 million people Ethiopia is often referred to as the 'water tower' of East Africa).
Could the Ethiopian wolf become an icon of the need to preserve water resources, much as the polar bear has become a globally recognised symbol of the environmental cost of climate change?
The stakes are high. But though today there are just six Ethiopian wolf populations, with more than half of the surviving animals in Bale Mountains National Park, we still have a reasonable chance of saving the species.
Top image: Ethiopian wolf, Canis simensis, in the Bale Mountains National Park, Ethiopia (credit: Getty Images)