From a low of 121 in 2010, the population of Bengal tigers in Nepal has increased to 355, according to the latest survey, which was revealed by the Prime Minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, to mark International Tiger Day on Friday. Conservationists have paid tribute to Nepal’s success in helping the big cat recover by cracking down on poaching, expanding national parks and creating wildlife corridors with neighboring India. Nepal is the first of 13 tiger range countries to update its figures ahead of a summit to be held in Vladivostok, eastern Russia, in September to assess global conservation efforts to protect the big cat. In 2010, governments pledged to double the world’s wild tiger population by the next Chinese year of the tiger, which is this year. Numbers hit an all-time low of 3,200 in 2010, down from about 100,000 a century ago. But in Nepal, dozens of recent tiger attacks on humans have led some to say that communities living near protected areas are paying a high price for the animal’s recovery. In the past three years there have been 104 tiger attacks in protected areas and 62 people have been killed, according to the Kathmandu Post. Victims were often attacked while gathering firewood, herding animals or foraging in the forest. Shiv Raj Bhatta, conservation program manager at WWF Nepal, said the increase in tiger numbers was good news, but warned that the country was entering a new stage of the big cat’s recovery in which people had to learn to live alongside tigers. “People now see and encounter tigers everywhere, so cases of tiger-human conflict are increasing. This shows that the tiger population is almost at its maximum level in Nepal. We are a small country. This increase is a new challenge for the government. Now we have to show tigers and people can co-exist,” he said. The number of 355 tigers announced on Friday is close to Nepal’s estimated capacity of up to 400 along the Chitwan-Parsa range, a landscape in the foothills of the Himalayas in India and Nepal that is rich in wildlife, including elephants and rhinoceros. Due to the climate crisis, Nepal’s tiger population is also expanding further north to higher altitudes. Mayukh Chatterjee, a member of the IUCN’s human-wildlife conflict and coexistence expert group, said the problems associated with tiger population growth were not limited to Nepal and tiger range governments needed to manage the situation carefully. Subscribe to Down to Earth, our exclusive weekly newsletter from our top correspondents on the climate crisis. “We are seeing the negative effects of the increased number of tigers in India and the increase in conflicts with people. I think it will be a disaster for tigers if governments don’t roll up their sleeves and start working with communities that live nearby. In the last three to five years we have seen a very high increase in tiger electrocution, tiger snaring as well as human lynching. Ten years ago you wouldn’t have seen that,” he said. Chatterjee studies the reasons behind tiger attacks on humans in national parks in India linked to those in Nepal. He found that cases of predation are rare, with most incidents caused by chance encounters. “People end up bumping into tigers much more often, so it leads to chance encounters where tigers get spooked when they are resting and attack back. Our data shows that around 80% of attacks are chance encounters where tigers have been disturbed or younger animals mistaking humans for prey. Cases of cannibalism are about 1%,” he said. Find more coverage of Age of Extinction here and follow our biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features.
