Antlers & Antelopes of India — Part 8. Read Part 7: The Nilgai →
At its lowest point, fewer than 200 hangul survived on earth. All of them in one national park on the outskirts of Srinagar. The hangul is India’s most endangered deer, the state animal of Jammu and Kashmir, and the only survivor of a subspecies of red deer that once ranged across the length of the western Himalayas. It is, very slowly, coming back.
Cervus hanglu hanglu — the Kashmir stag, locally called hangul — is not a species but a subspecies: one of the most isolated, most threatened, and most closely watched populations of any large mammal in South Asia. The biennial census conducted by the J&K Department of Wildlife Protection has become one of the most scrutinised wildlife events in Indian conservation. When the numbers go up, it is national news. When they go down — as they did from 800–900 individuals in the 1980s to 186 by 2017 — it becomes something closer to a conservation emergency.
The animal itself
The hangul is a large, reddish-brown deer — the Himalayan equivalent of the European red deer, of which it is a subspecies, though smaller and more compact. A mature stag stands approximately 1.1 to 1.2 metres at the shoulder and weighs between 150 and 200 kilograms. Its coat is deep chestnut in summer, greyish-brown in winter. The rump patch is pale cream, distinctive against the surrounding coat. The tail is short and dark.
The antlers are the hangul’s most recognisable feature — and arguably the most impressive of any deer in India. A mature stag carries a heavily beamed rack with typically five to six tines per side, the brow tine angling forward and the main beam sweeping back and up before forking into the royal and surroyal points. At their finest, a mature hangul’s antlers reach 90 to 100 centimetres, deeply wrinkled and dark with age. During the autumn rut — which peaks between late September and November, when the Dachigam forests are at their most spectacular — the stags’ bugling echoes through the Zabarwan ridges, audible from considerable distances.
The rut is the best time to see the hangul. Stags shed their velvet in August and return from the high-altitude summer pastures to the lower mixed forests of Dachigam, where they engage in parallel walks, roaring contests, and — when evenly matched — full antler-locking fights that can last for several minutes. In the early months of the year, new fawns — usually single, occasionally twins — are born in the lower forest, and mother and calf are intensely cryptic, resting in dense scrub through the day.
Where it lives — and how small that world has become
The hangul’s historical range was extensive. In the early 20th century, between 3,000 and 5,000 individuals ranged across the entire Kashmir Valley — from the Kishenganga catchments in the north to Kishtwar in the south, through the Sind Valley, Lolab Valley, Tulail, Aru, and the forests of Bandipora. The Maharaja of Kashmir established game reserves including Dachigam precisely to protect this population, limiting local hunting rights across large areas of the valley.
By the late 20th century, that range had collapsed to a single refuge. Today, the last viable population of hangul in the Indian subcontinent exists entirely within and around the 141 sq km of Dachigam National Park, situated just 22 kilometres from the centre of Srinagar at the base of the Zabarwan Range. A small number — perhaps a dozen to twenty individuals at most — survive in the Tral Wildlife Sanctuary and in isolated habitat patches in Kishtwar and Bhaderwah. But Dachigam is where the species’ fate will be decided.
Dachigam itself is not a large park by Indian standards. Its 141 sq km spans an elevation range of approximately 1,700 to 4,200 metres, moving from lower temperate oak and walnut forest through mixed coniferous forest to alpine meadows. The lower Dachigam area — where the Dachigam stream runs through open grassland and willow-lined banks — is the park’s most productive wildlife habitat and the primary winter range for hangul. It is also where the park’s boundaries press closest against the expanding perimeter of Srinagar city, creating a pressure gradient that wildlife managers have had to manage with constant attention.
What drove the population to the edge
The hangul’s decline was not caused by a single threat but by an accumulation of pressures over decades. Poaching — for meat, skin, and antlers — was severe through the 20th century and intensified dramatically during the Kashmir insurgency from the late 1980s onwards, when the collapse of regular forest department patrolling left Dachigam effectively unguarded for extended periods. A population that stood at around 300 individuals in the 1970s plunged to below 200 by the early 1990s.
Equally damaging, and less often discussed, was livestock grazing. Dachigam’s meadows and lower forest have historically been grazed by Bakarwal and Gujjar pastoralists who transit the park with large flocks of sheep and goats during the annual migration between winter lowlands and summer highlands. At peak grazing pressure, the competition for forage between domestic livestock and hangul was severe — particularly in the lower forest during winter, when the deer’s range is most restricted and its energy demands are highest. Wildlife managers have worked for decades to reduce livestock pressure through negotiated exclusion arrangements and improved grazing corridors outside the park, with partial success.
A third pressure — habitat fragmentation — has become increasingly acute as Srinagar has expanded towards the park’s boundary. The lower Dachigam area is separated from the city by a relatively thin buffer of degraded forest and human settlement. Roads, construction activity, and human disturbance at the park’s edge have progressively reduced the area of viable winter habitat available to the deer.
The long recovery — and the numbers that matter
The conservation response to the hangul’s decline was slow to organise but has produced real results over the past decade. The population chronology tells the story: 127 individuals in 2008; 186 in 2017; 197 in 2019; 237 in 2021; 289 in 2023. The 2025 census reveals the count to be 323.
The upward trend reflects a combination of interventions: intensified anti-poaching operations under the J&K Wildlife Protection Department; camera trap monitoring and individual identification research conducted with the Wildlife Institute of India; a fencing programme to exclude livestock from the most critical lower Dachigam habitat; and the Trees for Hanguls initiative, which has planted over 1.22 lakh native trees — predominantly kail and apricot — to restore degraded forest along the park’s edges.
A 2024 genetic study published in Oryx — using faecal DNA from 14 microsatellite markers — identified 293 individuals in the winter population of Dachigam, slightly exceeding the official census count and suggesting that the population is somewhat larger than what ground-based surveys have captured. The study also documented reduced genetic diversity consistent with a prolonged population bottleneck — a warning that even as numbers recover, the hangul remains genetically vulnerable to inbreeding and to environmental stresses it may lack the genetic variation to absorb.
The conflict at the park’s edge
The hangul’s relationship with the communities around Dachigam is complicated and consequential. The park’s establishment — and the exclusion of local communities from grazing and resource use that followed — created lasting grievances that continue to shape the conservation dynamic. Hangul that move outside the park boundary in winter or during the rut enter agricultural fields and orchards, damaging crops and creating conflict with farming families who receive compensation that is widely regarded as inadequate and slow to arrive.
The situation is further complicated by the park’s proximity to Srinagar, which means its management is subject to political and administrative pressures that more remote reserves are spared. Proposals for tourism development in Dachigam — which would bring revenue but also disturbance — have been debated periodically without resolution. The hangul’s continued presence depends not just on anti-poaching enforcement and habitat restoration but on the active tolerance of communities for whom the park represents both a restricted resource and a genuine source of local pride.
The stag in the valley
There is a quality to the hangul that the numbers — 289, 323, a subspecies clawing back from the edge — cannot fully capture. Dachigam in October is one of the finest wildlife landscapes in India: the Zabarwan ridge catching the first snow, the chinar trees turning gold along the valley floor, the sound of stags bugling in the early morning cold carrying across a park that is, in ecological terms, an island in a city. To stand in the lower Dachigam meadows at dawn in the rut is to understand, at first hand, why the people of Kashmir call the hangul their own — and why its survival matters in ways that extend beyond conservation biology into something older and harder to quantify.
The hangul has survived insurgency, livestock pressure, habitat loss, poaching, and the long indifference of a world that has never known it well. It has done so in a valley that has rarely been at peace. That it is still here — and that the numbers, carefully, are going up — is a conservation story that deserves more attention than it usually receives.
Next in the series: Part 9 — The Sangai: the world’s most unusual deer, living on a floating marsh in Manipur, and one of India’s most remarkable conservation recoveries.