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# Nepal counted its tigers, and there are 429
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/nepal-tigers/
- Published: 2026-08-18T20:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-21T13:06:45.000Z
- Description: One hundred and twenty one in 2009. Four hundred and twenty nine this year, in a country you could drive across in a day.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Global Good News, All stories, Rewilding

Between the last day of December and late April, teams across Nepal set about eleven hundred camera traps, rotated them through nineteen hundred survey points, and waited. Two hundred and fifty to three hundred people did the field work. The answer came back this winter: **429 wild tigers**.

In 2009 the figure was 121\. In 2022 it was 355\. Nepal is a country you could drive across in a day, and it now holds the third largest wild tiger population on earth, behind only India and Russia.

The forest came back at the same time, and that is not a coincidence. Nepal's forest cover went from around twenty nine per cent to over forty six per cent across roughly the same stretch of years, much of it through community forestry, where local user groups hold the rights to a patch of forest and the responsibility for it. People were brought inside the protection of the forest rather than fenced out of it, and the tigers followed the habitat.

The new count breaks down as 145 tigers in Chitwan, 112 in Bardiya, 71 in Parsa, 51 in Banke and 50 in Shuklaphanta.

Four of the five tiger areas went up. Bardiya went the other way, from 125 in 2022 down to 112\. Researchers are watching habitat pressure carefully, and more tigers in a small country means more thought has to go into where they can live and how people and tigers share ground. Success brings its own set of problems, and Nepal is now working on those rather than on the old one.

Still. A country with limited resources decided this mattered, said so out loud, and then did the unglamorous work for fifteen years. One hundred and twenty one became four hundred and twenty nine. That is what a decision looks like when somebody keeps making it.

Our short take: the 2026 national tiger survey, carried out between 31 December 2025 and 23 April 2026 using around 1,100 camera traps across 1,900 survey points, with a field team of 250 to 300\. Reported by the **Kathmandu Post**, **IUCN** and **WWF**. Comparative figures: 121 in 2009 and 355 in 2022\. Nothing in this story involves harm to any animal.