They Used to Hunt Nepal's Birds for Fun. Now They're Saving 900 Species.

Shankar Tiwari once hunted birds with a slingshot as a boy outside Chitwan National Park. Today, at 57, he tops Nepal's eBird "species leader" ranking with 516 species logged by sight — more birds than most people will see in an entire lifetime. He didn't get there with a slingshot. He got there because a foreign guest at the hotel where he worked once handed him a pair of binoculars instead, and he never put them down. He went on to found Travel Nepal, an ecotourism outfit that now trains other former hunters as birding guides.

Tiwari's turn from bird-hunter to Nepal's top birder is not a one-off. Across the lowlands and mid-hills fringing Chitwan and Koshi Tappu, a generation of men who once hunted birds for sport or food has become the backbone of the country's grassroots conservation movement — and, increasingly, of its tourism economy. It helps that Nepal is an outlier: a country roughly the size of Illinois that spans everything from 60-metre tropical plains to the 8,849-metre summit of Everest, packing more bird species into that vertical range than almost anywhere on Earth.

The shift is documented in new reporting from Mongabay, based on interviews and a survey of 135 Nepali birdwatchers led by researcher Kamal Raj Gosai and co-author Hem Bahadur Katuwal, an assistant professor at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden. Their study found citizen birdwatchers are quietly filling major gaps in Nepal's official wildlife data — spotting range shifts, new arrivals and local extinctions that government surveys, chronically under-resourced, simply miss.

"Birdwatchers are often the first to notice when something changes," Ishana Thapa, CEO of Bird Conservation Nepal, told Mongabay. In 2024 alone, citizen observers logged three species never before recorded in the country — the white-cheeked starling, Naumann's thrush and the spotted flycatcher — each a small data point helping researchers track how climate change and habitat loss are reshaping migration routes across the Himalaya.

Not every sighting reaches conservationists, though. The same study found only 37% of surveyed birdwatchers shared their records on citizen-science platforms like eBird or with groups such as Bird Conservation Nepal — nearly half kept their sightings entirely private. Researchers say closing that gap could sharpen Nepal's picture of which habitats are quietly emptying out.

That picture is already troubling in places. A 2021–2022 survey of the Bagmati River corridor near Kathmandu recorded just 67 species, down from more than 100 documented historically in the same stretch — a casualty of urban sprawl and river pollution. Duck populations at Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve, once one of South Asia's great wetland birding sites, have also fallen sharply, researchers found.

What this means for trekkers

Our Chitwan Jungle Safari and Bardia National Park Safari both run through prime habitat for many of Nepal's 900+ species — ask your guide for a birding-focused itinerary and you'll likely spot more in three days than most checklists log in a season.

Source: Mongabay, "Nepal's birdwatchers help monitor wildlife and promote tourism," July 6, 2026.

Cover photo: Aditya Pal via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).