In October 2024, we travelled across five districts to talk with communities about the wildlife corridor in eastern Nepal we are creating.
Udayapur District
We began our trip in Udayapur after a long day of driving from Kathmandu on a different road than we normally take because of the flooding. There were some difficult slippery spots. We made it to the Tharu Homestay near the town of Gaighat at about 10 pm after 14 hours of driving.
The next day at 7 am, we met with the 13 community forestry groups and other local officials, including Federation of Community Forestry Users Nepal (FECOFUN), the mayor and assistant mayor, and a representative from the Department of Forests.
Thanks to Deepak Bantawa, one of the community forest chairmen, for organizing the event.
We presented the results from camera trapping, which our partner, NCSC, recently completed, and Deepak presented the communities’ vision for wildlife conservation in their forests. We got a lot of local press coverage of the event – which was great. See such piece of press here (right click in Chrome to translate to English).
At the meeting, we shared videos of the 21 wildlife species, including 18 mammals (two globally Vulnerable, one nationally Endangered, and five nationally Vulnerable mammal species), some of which are featured in the photos below.
You can read NCSC’s summaries of our activities in Udayapur here.
The next day we visited a community forest in the eastern part of the district, with community members who are also interested in camera trapping and learning what they have in their forests.
They said they’ve seen fewer wildlife than in the past, but more problems with wildlife – which seemed contradictory and we couldn’t get a clear explanation of what this meant. This is one reason increasing people’s knowledge about wildlife and conducting some basic monitoring is important. Through this, we can understand if people’s day-to-day anecdotal perceptions match reality.
That night, back at the Tharu Homestay, we shared videos of the camera trapped animals with community members, including lots of women and children. This community’s forest is on the other side of the valley from where we camera trapped, and seeing the photos and videos got them interested in the wildlife in their forests.
We talked with their community forest chairman and we hope to collaborate with them in the future. Here we also heard contradictory perceptions about wildlife in their forests, with some saying there is little wildlife because of poachers coming from the areas further north in the hills and others saying they have plenty of wildlife in their forests.
Saptari District
In the Saptari District, across the Koshi River from the Koshi Tappu Wildlife Sanctuary, we met with a number of community forest groups. They were excited to start camera trapping and to learn more about the wildlife in their forests. This area has a lot of sloth bears and people are interested in conserving the area for sloth bears. Sloth bears are quite dangerous, with people coming into conflict with them fairly frequently.
Sunsari District
From there we moved eastward to the city of Dharan, in Sunsari District, to meet with NCSC’s interns and volunteers, some of whom came with us on the trip. I gave a short, informal talk about communities and conservation along with insights and inputs from Birendra and Jeevan. We ended the session playing the Community Conservation board game, which was a big hit.
One of our goals from this meeting was to motivate the female volunteers to want to go into the field to help with the camera trapping and work with communities. They are primarily interested in conducting education activities in schools. This isn’t an easy issue to address in Nepal because fieldwork often entails a different set of guidelines when women are included, like not going alone and having to find alternative transportation since so few women can drive a motorcycle. This all entails more money, which is not always available on the shoestring budgets that community conservation projects usually have.
Later in the day, we met with community forest groups in Sunsari District to discuss the wildlife corridor. We’ve informally met with people in this district previously, but this was our first formal meeting with community forest groups to discuss camera trapping. Kul Bahadur Limbu, faculty at the Post Graduate Campus, Biratnagar, who is from the area, joined us in the meeting. One of our long-term goals is to link local colleges with our project in this district and the others.
Jhapa and Morang Districts
From Sunsari District, we moved to the far eastern districts of Jhapa and Morang. These were the first districts where we camera trapped and we wanted to follow up with the Community-Based Anti-Poaching groups (CBAPUs) that were formed last year to address poaching issues.
These were smaller, more informal meetings to discuss what they thought should be the next steps. Their ideas included basic awareness and information about biodiversity conservation, the role of wildlife in a healthy forest, the conservation status of various species, and species’ habitat and food needs. New forestry guidelines suggest 20% of forests should be planted with species that provide food for wildlife but people aren’t sure what species to plant, such as fruit and grasses and for which species.
iNaturalist!
We have been putting our camera trapping photos into the program iNaturalist. The red marks in the map below are places we have added photos. You can find our umbrella project at iNaturalist.org by clicking or searching for “Community Wildlife Corridor, Southeastern Nepal.”
