Oh Deer!

Kashmir has barely 200 Hangul deer left, but it does not seem to be alarming enough for the state government, whose conservation initiatives are struggling to get off the ground.

- Zehra Mohammad

AT THE Dachigam National Park in Jammu and Kashmir, 22 km from Srinagar, employees and volunteers of wildlife organisations are participating in a rather tough biennial exercise. They are looking for foot marks, faecal pellets and other signs to determine the number of Hanguls or the Kashmiri Red Stags, the state animal of Jammu and Kashmir. Their estimates will be fed into the Hangul census, last conducted in 2015. Aliya Mir, manager at Wildlife sos Kashmir, a non-profit, says an accurate head count of the animal is not possible. “It is a very shy animal. One sound and the animal just dashes out of sight,” she says.

Hangul comes from the Kashmiri word haang, which means a dark, rusty brown colour. It is the only surviving subspecies of the red deer family in the Indian subcontinent. The stags boast magnificent antlers of 11 to 16 points, which they shed during the mating season in March, another indicator used by surveyors to estimate the number of males during the census.

The Hangul were present in thousands towards the beginning of the 20th century in many parts of Kashmir. The number dropped drastically by the 1970s as hunting permits were misused to poach the Hangul in large numbers (see ‘Diminishing numbers’, p27). Though militancy in the 1990s deterred people from venturing into the forests to hunt, the downward trend has continued. The census of 2015 had estimated that there were only 186 Hangul deer left in Dachigam, the last habitat of the animal, and the 2017 census has once again brought into question the state’s failure to revive their population.

Breeding collapse