How Nepal Brought Its Wild Tigers Back From 121 to 429

Cew/Shutterstock

Yes, Nepal really did nearly double its wild tigers. A national survey carried out between November 2017 and April 2018 counted 235 Bengal tigers, against 121 in 2009, and the recovery has kept going since. The next count, in 2022, found 355, and a survey released in July 2026 put the figure at about 429. For an endangered big cat that has vanished from most of its old range, that is one of the clearest conservation wins of the century so far.

Below is what the 2018 count showed, how scientists actually count a shy, striped predator, why the numbers climbed, and the harder side of the story: what happens to villages when tigers come back.

What the 2018 survey found

Nepal's Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC) announced the 2018 result in the autumn of that year. The figure of 235 tigers came from fieldwork spread across the lowland forests and grasslands of the Terai, the strip of flat country along the border with India where all of Nepal's tigers live.

The department's then director general, Man Bahadur Khadka, credited joint work by government, local people and conservation groups to guard habitat and stop poaching. Speaking to AFP, he also warned that the job was not finished: The challenge now is to continue these efforts to protect their habitats and numbers for the long-term survival of the tigers.

WWF Nepal

The map above, from WWF Nepal, shows the tiger landscape in question. The red and orange core areas mark the protected areas, among them Chitwan and Bardia National Parks and the reserves at Parsa and Shuklaphanta, while the green bands show the forest corridors that let tigers move between them and across into India. That network of corridors, part of the wider Terai Arc Landscape, matters as much as the parks themselves: young tigers need room to leave home and find territories of their own.

How do you count tigers?

Nobody walks through the jungle ticking off tigers one by one. Survey teams fix pairs of motion-triggered cameras to trees along trails and riverbeds, leave them for weeks, and then sort through the photographs. Every tiger has a unique stripe pattern, rather like a fingerprint, so experts can recognise the same animal each time it walks past a camera.

Statistical capture-recapture models then estimate how many tigers live in each area, including ones that slipped past the lenses. That is why official figures are given as estimates, often with a range, and why a single number should always be read together with the year, area and method behind it. The 2022 count, for example, covered 18,928 square kilometres, more than 12 per cent of Nepal, and took 16,811 days of field staff time.

Why Nepal's tigers recovered

There was no single trick. Conservationists and officials usually point to a handful of things working together:

• Protected habitat. Large parks in the Terai are guarded, and forest corridors between them have been restored so that tigers are not trapped on habitat islands.
• Anti-poaching patrols. Rangers, with army support, patrol the parks, and intelligence work targets the trade in skins and bones.
• Prey. A tiger needs a steady supply of deer, wild pigs and similar animals. Protecting grasslands keeps prey numbers up, and more prey means more tigers can raise cubs.
• Local communities. Community forests and buffer-zone groups give villagers a share in the benefits of conservation, including tourism income, so they have reasons to protect wildlife rather than tolerate poachers.
• Political will. WWF-Nepal's country director, Ghana S. Gurung, called the 2022 result a product of political will, backed by consistent government commitment over more than a decade.

Celebrities helped draw attention too. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, whose foundation has supported tiger work with WWF, shared the news in September 2018:

I am proud of @dicapriofdn’s partnership with @World_Wildlife to support Nepal and local communities in doubling the population of wild tigers. https://t.co/RZzOCue1Dm

— Leonardo DiCaprio (@LeoDiCaprio) September 23, 2018

The global picture and the TX2 pledge

Tigers once ranged from eastern Turkey and the Caspian region to Siberia, Indonesia and the islands of Java and Bali. More than 100,000 are thought to have lived in the wild at the start of the 20th century. Hunting, the loss of forests to farms and towns, and the loss of prey cut that to an estimated 3,200 by 2010. Today the species occupies less than 7 per cent of its historic range and has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 1986.

In 2010, at an international tiger summit in St Petersburg, the 13 countries that still have wild tigers agreed on a shared goal, nicknamed TX2: to double the world's wild tiger population by 2022, the next Chinese Year of the Tiger. Nepal was one of them, and its 2018 result showed that the target was within reach.

A common myth is that the world's tigers are still at about 3,200. That number belongs to 2010. The IUCN's 2022 assessment put the wild population at roughly 3,726 to 5,578 individuals, partly because numbers rose in countries such as Nepal and India and partly because counting methods improved. Our related article on the IUCN's 2022 tiger assessment looks at that update in more detail.

Later counts: 355 in 2022 and 429 in 2026

On 29 July 2022, International Tiger Day, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba announced that Nepal's National Tiger and Prey Survey had found 355 tigers, almost three times the 2009 baseline. The survey was led by the DNPWC with the National Trust for Nature Conservation, ZSL Nepal and WWF-Nepal. With that figure, Nepal became the first country to report that it had met its TX2 pledge.

The growth did not stop there. A survey announced in July 2026 estimated about 429 tigers, roughly 20 per cent more than four years earlier. More than 3,600 motion-sensitive cameras were placed across five protected areas and more than 7,300 square kilometres of the southern plains. Bardiya district alone was home to about 112 tigers, compared with 18 in 2009. Officials described growth of about 5 per cent a year and put it down mainly to secure habitat.

The other side of success: living with tigers

More tigers in a small country with a growing human population means more meetings between the two. Government data show that at least 38 people were killed in tiger attacks in Nepal between 2019 and 2023, and livestock losses are a constant worry for families near the parks. Advocates for victims in Bardiya say help after attacks has been too slow.

Practical answers include fair and fast compensation, predator-proof livestock pens, community warning systems, safer ways to collect firewood and fodder, and protecting the corridors so tigers are less likely to wander through villages. Many conservationists now say the next test for Nepal is less about raising the number and more about keeping local support, because tigers survive only where the people who live beside them can live with them too.

If you enjoy stories of small, threatened animals as well as big ones, read our piece on the Ili pika, an elusive mountain mammal.

Sources: WWF: Nepal nearly triples wild tiger population (29 July 2022); Kuwait Times/AFP: Nepal's tiger numbers climb 20% to estimated 429 (July 2026); Wikipedia: Tiger; IFLScience (2018); AFP via CNA (2018). Top photo: Cew/Shutterstock. Habitat map: WWF Nepal.