This is what one can see during the drive with naked eyes. The hidden attraction, particularly for the conservationists, is the valley's rich flora and fauna, or the wildlife, and how they survive amid multiple threats, such as ceasefire violations along the Line of Control (LoC), a barbed fence restricting their free movement as well as poaching.
Beyond Lawat lies Dawarian village, at a distance of 106 kilometres from Muzaffarabad. This village may have been earlier famous for its cherries and the gateway to a famous shrine in Jhaag Sharif, but for about a year or so it has gained fame for being home to two orphaned black bear cubs being kept at a trout fish hatchery there.
Incidentally, this past weekend, I was able to make it to Dawarian. An under construction link road stemming from the main artery runs past the fenced compound housing the hatchery, hardly 500 metres ahead. I enter the compound only to be greeted by the cheerful staff of the AJK wildlife and fisheries department, both in civvies and uniform, engaged with the cubs.
Muhammad Ashraf Raza, one of the assistant game wardens in the area, points to the lofty mountains across the Neelum River - which is overlooked by his office - and tells me the cubs were brought from the highest of these peaks in the closest proximity of the heavily militarized LoC on April 30 last year after being spotted by some nomads in their flock.
According to the IUCN Red Book, Asiatic black bear falls in the category of ‘threatened species’ as poachers kill it for its fat, gallbladder, bile and genital organs and hide. The mother-bear never leaves its cubs alone even for a short while. Sighting of the newborns without mother along the LoC meant the she-bear had fallen prey to some landmine or shelling across the divide, marked by a 12 feet high electric fence, explains Raza.
“We started to raise them like members of our family and one of our senior officers named the duo as Sharda (female) and Narda (male) after two famous peaks of the area," he tells.
Every day at about 7am, the uniformed staffers unlock the duo's cage to feed them and let them wander on the compound.
"If we are late in opening the cage or serving them food, the cubs do not hide their anger, says Arif Kazmi, one of the wildlife guards, with whom the cubs love to frolic.
The food being offered to them these days comprises 25 rotis of wheat and some other items “in keeping with the wildlife department's meagre fiscal resources” that hardly allow them to provide all items suggested by a team of Islamabad Wildlife Management Board during a recent visit.
“When we lose their sight for a while this is what we face,'' Kazmi says, pointing to the cubs having entered the troutlets' shelter from a narrow opening at the top and his colleagues beating the roof with sticks to force the duo to scale down.
“It takes a hell lot of effort to bring them down. Since we can’t beat them we try to create noise so that they descend and settle down in their abode.”
The noise, particularly that of the vehicles, makes the duo scary. If they are out of their cage and a vehicle moves past the compound, they rush towards the other side, bringing smiles to the onlookers for whom bear cubs are an otherwise rare sight and thus a great source of entertainment.
“Initially we were scared of them. But the fear has dwindled. Now we love to watch them closely and pat them,” 8th grade student Muzammil Chaudhry tells me while he and some other kids play and pat the cubs.
As young boys directly engage themselves with the cubs, many adults watch them from behind the fence on the adjacent link road.
However, what is now worrying the staff is the gradual change in the behavior of the nearly 14 months old omnivores, as at times the duo becomes aggressive, particularly the female cub.
This is what necessitates their relocation to their natural habitat in the forests or in some protected area at the earliest, says Naeem Iftikhar Dar, Director of the AJK wildlife and fisheries department.
“These cubs are too much acclimatized to human beings. Suppose we release them into thick forests and there, on seeing any human they may go close to him out of their previous attachment to the humans,” he tells me.
“And the scary human might hurt or kill them in self defence.”
“The second option is to build a big enclosure in some protected area, where they should be kept for a certain period with no contact with the humans. After sometime an opening should be created in the enclosure from where they can ‘escape’ to the wilderness,” adds Dar.
But that’s not the only issue that these cubs have brought into the spotlight, at least once again.
Javed Ayub, who has long headed this department and now happens to be its administrative secretary, traces the link between the plight of the wildlife, cubs being an example, and the deep rooted Kashmir conflict.
“So much has been said and written about the human miseries but little does the world know that our flora and fauna have also terribly suffered due to the tensions at the LoC and particularly because of the electric fence built by India in 2004,” he tells me in his office in Muzaffarabad.
“While we can relocate the affected human populations, we cannot evacuate our wildlife whenever there is exchange of shelling across the LoC.”
According to him, since the terrestrial animals do not remain restricted to a particular area and keep on moving from one location to the other for grazing, predating, breeding and rearing purposes the fence stands in the way of their free movement.
Even though the human settlements in AJK are located close to the LoC as compared to the India held side, the wildlife movement across the divide had however always been a two-way process before the fence was erected, he notes.
Ayub points out that due to less human intervention close to the LoC in India held side, terrestrial animals would find food there in abundance particularly in summers. And as the fence has restricted their cross LoC movement, the carnivores are sometimes compelled to descend onto the human population on our side and get hurt or killed.
In winters, when snow falls as high as 15-20 feet in the high altitude areas where the fence runs through, some animals move to the opposite side in search of food or sanctum and when the snow melts beneath the fence they do not find a way back to their original habitat, he says.
According to Ayub, Kashmir Stag would be cited from Dawarian to upstream Haanthi Nullah before the construction of the fence. But now its prevalence in AJK is no more, he laments.
POACHING - MORE PERILUOUS THAN HUNTING
Last month, a black bear cub, namely Dabbu, was rescued from Lahore after allegedly having been transported from the Neelum valley.
However, both Ayub and Dar deny this assertion outright.
“There is no official or unofficial confirmation of the cub's transportation from Neelum. There are many organised groups in Pakistan [involved in illicit animal trade] and they have used the name of our area to divert attention from the actual source,” asserts Ayub.
However he admits that his department faces acute shortage of trained technical staff and fiscal resources to man at least 11 entry-exit points between AJK and Pakistan and take care of all 21 protected areas, including seven national parks, in a territory spread over 13297 sq kilometres.
He agrees that poaching poses more serious threat to the wildlife than hunting, because trading of animals or their parts for fiscal gains means their imminent genocide. However, he regrets that unlike the past, international wildlife conservation organisations are not extending considerable cooperation to his department in this regard.
“Alone, we cannot cope with this uphill task… We need global support.”
Back in the Dawarian trout hatchery, Kazmi says over the past 14 or so months "Sharda and Narda" have become part of their lives.
“But sooner or later we will have to relocate them to a proper habitat… Surely we will miss them.”
Tariq Naqash
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