India's rich Wildlife: Hangul's or Kashmir Red Deer in Dachigam National Park, Srinagar, J&K

As a child I always wanted to visit Dachigam to see Hanguls or Kashmir Red Deer which is India's one of the most endangered deer.
Some considered it as a separate species from European Red Deer. It is also India's only species of Red Deer.
I made plan with my uncle Mr. Shashank Gupta and he also agreed to come as he also wanted to see Hanguls.

We booked our flight and reached Srinagar on 23rd Sept. 09.

Dachigam is around 18 Kms from Srinagar. So we took the closest Hotel to Dachigam which was still far ha ha ha ha . There are no close Hotels or Resorts around the National Park. Thanks to Neel Sir for arranging permits as it a militant zone and most of the park is under Army surveillance.
One can only do trek if you have special permits.

We used our 1st day in gathering permits for the next 4 days and explored Srinagar little bit.

Next morning we were at the gate at around 5:30 am, our trekker Bashir Ahmad was waiting for us and told that very good chances of seeing Himalayan Black Bears but one has to have courage to see them on foot as Bears can be very dangerous some time.

We started our trek and after some 2-3 minutes I asked Bashir about the precautions one should take when one sees a Black Bear. As I finished the line, a 6 months old Bear crossed 10 ft in front of us, we were all extremely happy as it is very difficult to see bears in Himalayas.

So we continued our trek and after few Kms our Trekker Bashir trekked us down to a valley where we we expecting some more Bears. In that small valley of around 500 Mt's we saw 21 individual Himalayan Black Bears from 2 months old young ones to 15 years old huge male and we saw them climbing the tree as well.
I was dancing and was so happy to see so many Bears and we made the record of seeing the most H.Bears in single trek.

Then we came to know why there were so many Bears in that small place?????????
A fruit called Acorn (Cirques robber) as told to us by our Tracker which fruits before snow falls and that's why all the Bears don't mind other bears presence, these are days when bears eat a lot to increase fat and then they go for Hibernation.

In our evening trek we just saw the glimpse of Hangul Stag running very fast and disappearing in the bushes. I was very great full of seeing at least one individual as it was an extremely rare animal on Planet and that to my lifer Mammal.

Next morning we again started our trek and this time we saw individual 18 Black Bears. I saw and photographed courting of Bears all well.

At evening again we saw Hangul but very far on top of the mountain but heard Rutting calls of another Deer from the bush.
The rutting call resembles like roaring of a big cat.

After 2 mornings I stopped counting Bears as they were so many. This was a special or turned out to be special morning. We were looking for a lone male Bear to photographed. I spotted a Bear on a tree. So we decided to wait for the Bear to come down, then we could able to take pics without disturbing it.
After few minutes of waiting a small cub climbed down fast and then second and behind was the mother. As the mother saw us it started making sound and ran after us, 1st one to run was our trekker so we also decided to run and we ran 100 ft and stopped buy the time whole family ran away.

Evening trek was again very special. We met Range Officer at the gate and he send us to that place where chances of spotting Hanguls would be more, So we just waited waited and is some time started hearing Rutting call. After waiting for 1/2 an hour. Bashir suddenly spotted 2 Hanguls both were Stags and one of them was the Biggest they have in the Park.

We saw them for 45 Minutes and as it was getting dark so we left them there and came back to the gate while coming back again saw some Bears walking on the road like our Tigers do in the night.

I saw 2 lifer birds Tytler's Leaf Warbler and Sind Woodpecker both are extremely rare to spot.