The curious case of brown bears in Kargil and Kashmir

Intesar Suhail

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In the spring of 2016, I embarked upon a trek in the mountains of Drass to look for and, if possible, photograph the elusive brown bear. As the Wildlife Warden of Kargil district in Jammu and Kashmir (now in Ladakh), I had received reports of cattle depredation by the bears around Drass and we were tasked with compensating the losses. Although bear appearances — often in the shape of night raids on the feebly secured cattle sheds — were frequent in the villages, a worthwhile daytime sighting in the ‘wild’, which I was interested in, was still a big ask. My guide, the local Ranger, well versed with the area, was confident though.

Weighing up to 300 kg, brown bear is the largest land carnivore in the world. The Himalayan brown bear, inhabiting the western Himalayas from Kargil through Kashmir, Himachal and Uttarakhand, is smaller than its cousin — the Grizzly Bear of North America and Europe — and rarer to sight. A decade back, it was so difficult to see a Himalayan brown bear in the wild in our part of its range, that you could count those who had done so on your fingers!

We had started at daybreak and after a two-and-a-half-hour trek up a hill, in arguably the world’s second coldest inhabited place, we arrived at a plateau, which I was told was the best location to sight the brown bear. I scanned the area with my binoculars and could see a vast tract of green meadows interspersed with patches of snow from the past winter, but no trace of the bear. We sat down beside a large rock to shield ourselves from the morning chill while we had our breakfast. Just as I rose up after finishing mine, and glanced casually over the rock, I saw, what appeared to my naked eye, a small herd of cattle grazing at the far end of the meadow.

The uniform brownish colour of all the individuals in the herd made me curious and when I picked my binocs to have a better look, I was stunned to see as many as eight brown bears, three adults and five young ones of different age groups, grazing nonchalantly! I grabbed my camera to capture this spectacle, but the bears somehow sensed our presence and took off at an astonishing pace. I still managed to get six of them in the frame. Back then, I could not have imagined that the image, which through social and print media was flashed across the country, would be a precursor in turning Drass into a favourite destination for the brown bear seekers, as it has become today.

Around the same time, brown bear sightings also started to become common in the Kashmir valley. During my journey from Kargil to Srinagar a few weeks later, I saw a mother bear with two cubs crossing the highway near Sonamarg. In the summer of 2017, when I was posted in south Kashmir, my staff rescued a cub from a langar camp en route to the Amarnath cave. The young one had stuck its head in a discarded ghee canister, which had to be torn open to free the poor fellow. In the following years, while Drass became a famed hotspot for brown bear viewing, sightings in Kashmir, from north to south, were reported like never before.

A camera trap installed in the Hirpora Wildlife Sanctuary in Shopian district captured a female with two cubs on a sheep carcass. A friend of mine, an avid nature lover, clicked a prime male while birding in the forests of Budgam and another recorded a huge one on his cellphone cam on a garbage dump in Gurez, Bandipora.

Increased brown bear sightings across Kargil and Kashmir over the past seven to eight years may seem to be an encouraging sign, but conservationists would advise you to take it with a pinch of salt. As I noticed in Drass later, the bears were attracted to a roadside landfill site where a local Army camp dumped its kitchen refuse. The animals would take the same route to visit the site almost every night and return to the forest by dawn. They were so punctual that you certainly would encounter one, if you were on their trail about sunrise. In Sonamarg, as also in Gurez, it’s the garbage, primarily the biowaste from hotels and restaurants, that is responsible for a high bear ‘encounter rate’.

As high-altitude mammals, brown bears are highly sensitive to climate change and the most pronounced effect on their ecology is the shortening of their hibernation period. As a rule, to adjust to the temperature changes, species tend to shift to higher altitudes, but brown bears — already present at very high altitudes (up to 5000m) — hardly have any room to push further up.

Brown bears, unlike their darker relatives, the black bears, live in habitats remote from human habitations, and left to themselves are seldom encountered by humans. As such, although livestock losses occur, human casualties due to brown bears in our part of the world have thus far remained negligible. However, anthropogenic activity around the habitats of these bears alters their behaviour and increases the possibilities of human-bear interface. In Kupwara district of north Kashmir, instances of brown bears turning up at graveyards and digging out corpses have come to light, alarming us of the severity of the human-brown bear conflict we may get to witness in the coming years.

— The writer is Wildlife Warden, Department of Wildlife Protection, J&K