In the Sunsari district of eastern Nepal there is a small forest called Panchakanya, held sacred by the local Hindu and Kirat communities and cared for accordingly, generation after generation. In January 2025 researchers quietly placed camera traps along its trails and beside its burrows, and one night the cameras caught something wonderful: a Chinese pangolin, one of the most endangered mammals on Earth, ambling past in its suit of armour. It is the first time the species has ever been recorded in the district, and it brings the number of Nepali districts where this shy creature is known to live to twenty eight.
The team also counted nearly thirty burrows in the little forest, especially where the ants and termites are busiest, which suggests Panchakanya may be home to more than one. The finding, published this year in the conservation journal Oryx, carries a lesson bigger than one animal: even small patches of forest outside national parks can be a refuge for the world's rarest wildlife, especially when a community loves a place enough to leave it standing. The villagers of Sunsari were not trying to save a pangolin. They were keeping a promise to a forest, and the forest kept a promise back.
Our short take: the camera trap study was published in Oryx (Cambridge University Press) and reported by Mongabay, June 2026. Photograph: a Chinese pangolin, by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).