Goats on the Border
-By Vivek Menon, Executive Director, WTI

A Kashmir markhor (Capra falconeri cashmiriensis)

I am writing this, sitting under a rock-overhang, six hundred metres up a sheer cliff. Around me, the landscape is powder-white clad in three feet of snow. The ascent up here has taken me six hours and what started as an easy ramble up the banks of the Jhelum had turned, in the last quarter, into a slow trudge over sludge. With night fast falling, our small team had to make quicker pace but my ice shovels were sinking into the snow faster than toothpicks in butter. As my legs gave way, there was only one way to make it to the top; take the extended hand of Akbar, local guide and assistant, and for that last two miles, a smiling spirit, sent from up above to help clumsy plainspeople climb the Kazinag. At the top, a blue tarpaulin had been stretched across the overhang and two fires placed strategically to toast frozen toes and cook dinner simultaneously. As I clamber onto my perch, a koklass pheasant cries in the distance “Kok-kar-Kok ku-ku”. I agree wearily and settle in for the night. 

Limber Wildlife Sanctuary in Jammu & Kashmir. Inset: Markhor survey team members Vivek Menon, Shahid Bashir Khan and Riyaz Ahmed

We are 30 miles from the LoC with Pakistan, in the Uri district of Kashmir. 30 miles as the crow flies and only a bit more as the markhor walks. This, here, is the global capital for this race of the world’s largest mountain goat, the Pir Panjal markhor. Read the otherwise excellent field guide to the mammals of Pakistan by Roberts and after describing its range in Chitral, it says “A very few also occur in Azad Kashmir (POK) but only one small herd estimated at fifteen to twenty individuals in the western extremity of the Kazinag range. The remaining markhor, in the tributaries of the Neelam valley close to the ceasefire line, have all been exterminated in recent years by troops stationed in this frontier region”. That was written in a revised edition of 1997. Since then, much has happened between the two countries and a tangible reminder is the 550 km of concertina fence that has sprung up along the LOC.  The Indian Army and Border Security Force Battalions guard the fence on the Indian side of the border. I am sure there are similar positions on the Pakistan side as well. On both sides of the border, tripping nimbly from crag to peak, are the markhor; fine old billies, copper ruff fanning the air, golden-white beards swishing around and 50-inch  corkscrews mounted proudly on their ramrod bodies. Elsewhere she-goats and kids gambol in the snow, the young ones, mock-fighting each other, spraying loose snow and gravel while their mothers crop whatever green clings onto bare rocks or wormwood bushes amidst the snowy middens. So Roberts was wrong after all, and the Indian side of the border does have the markhor that have survived the conflict, survived the troops and survived the fence.

The story of the enumeration of the markhor on the Indian side of the border has an interesting story. It was in 2003 and the Bombay Natural History Society was celebrating the centenary of its vintage journal. On the occasion, they decided to honour the legendary American naturalist and writer George Schaller with  the Salim Ali International Conservation Award. Schaller, accepted the award graciously, but in a surprising turn on the stage, reminiscent of a pirouetting markhor, he donated the monetary component to the Wildlife Trust of India, so that (paraphrasing his words), the money remained in India and was used well in the field. Schaller’s monumental work, Mountain Monarchs, was foremost in my mind as we accepted this gesture and thus was born Schaller Conservation Surveys, with the markhor in Kashmir being its first beneficiary. Seven years have passed since then and many a season of meticulous field work by a small band of field workers have established markhor numbers, their distribution and even a bit of their ecology and behaviour. What was interesting however, were the two clear populations that WTI and the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) established in Kashmir in partnership with the Jammu and Kashmir Wildlife department.

Survey team members scan the slopes for markhors

One was in the half a dozen or so nallahs that ran through the Kazinag range. Two sanctuaries, in Limber and Lachipora and an old game reserve in Naganari, were existing but the boundaries of the reserves were low in the hills, along the banks of the Jhelum and not high enough for the markhor in many parts. Walking the Malangan and Gujjar nallahs in Lachipora for example or the Mithavani in the Limber, it was immediately clear that to protect the rare goat, it was needed to take the protected area all the way up the mountain slope- for seasonal altitudinal migration, is an attribute of the goat. Thus was born the Kazinag National Park concept, and to the credit of the state government, in December 2008, the Park was notified making it the first national park notified in Kashmir since 1986. A good story coming out of the valley after decades, all thanks to a goat!

Even more interesting was the case of Hirapora. When the surveys began in 2004, WTI followed an old shikar map sixty years old, which marked out the distribution of various ‘game species’ including the markhor. Even after 60 years of independence, this was the best distributional map available to researchers to base a survey on…so much for the various institutions mandated to conduct zoological surveys in the country. Most of the markhor areas shown in the map, did not have markhor by the 1980s, a clear sign of the shrinkage of its range. However, Hirapora sanctuary, about 75 km outside Srinagar, surprised us with an estimation of 150 plus goats. Good, so the goats had moved and found themselves a new home, and in a sanctuary (yet another sign of independent India’s fauna remaining only in the protected area network created in the early 70s by a prescient government). But with the good news, came bad news, the Hirapora sanctuary was about to be de-notified, or a part of it definitely, for through it passed the strategic Mughal road that roughly halved the distance between remote Poonch and Rajouri areas in Jammu Province with Srinagar in Kashmir valley; upgradation of the Mughal road to a highway was planned in the late 1980s and the work was initiated in 2006.
 
In the face of bettering the lives of people haunted for decades by insurgency and virtual isolation, what chance did the fate of a wild billy have? Conservation today is full of such choices and the story of Hirapora shows what a bit of ingenuity, a dollop of science and the right politics can do for conservation. WTI first brought out a critical document with the NCF  and the state wildlife department that clearly showed the markhor distribution. It then encouraged local groups to take the case of the road to court, and an intrepid youngster did just that bringing it to the Central Empowered Committee of the Supreme Court. With the conservation value of the area now established and the case sub judice, the Trust used its political nimbleness and conservation pragmatism to recommend to the CEC that the road, if it did have to pass through the area would effectively make the markhor shift their territory and thus new territory needed to be given to the sanctuary. The court did not only that, awarding 149 sq kms of additional land to Hirapora but also putting stringent conditions on the building of the road and even better encouraged the union government to set up a markhor recovery plan and fund for the state to conserve the last of these magnificent mountain monarchs. In a single sweep, Kashmir had got itself a new National Park (Kazinag), increased the area of a wildlife sanctuary by 50% (Hirapora) and  greatly increased the revenues available to the wildlife department of Jammu and Kashmir to protect its wildlife. The adroitness of the scheme is only surpassed, by the skill of the markhor, to have survived through so much conflict and human turmoil, right at the very line of no return. 

Photos: Dr George Schaller (top), WTI (others)

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Rescue in the new year