Nepal Just Counted 429 Wild Tigers — More Than Triple What It Had 15 Years Ago

Fifteen years ago, conservationists in Nepal were counting tigers in the hundreds — barely. The new National Tiger and Prey Base Survey, unveiled by the Ministry of Forests and Environment around World Tiger Day, puts the current number at 429 wild tigers across five protected areas. In 2009, the same census methodology counted 121. Nepal's tiger population has more than tripled — closing in on quadrupling — in a decade and a half, according to the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation.

The by-park breakdown shows the recovery is not even. Chitwan, Nepal's oldest national park and the country's original tiger stronghold, still leads by a wide margin. But the sharpest growth is in the smaller western parks — Parsa and Banke — which have added tigers faster in percentage terms than Chitwan itself, evidence that the population is now spreading into habitat it had abandoned decades ago. Bardiya National Park is the one clear exception: it recorded 112 tigers this round, down from 125 in 2022, a decline officials are watching closely rather than dismissing as noise.

Success this size has a cost. Nepali officials confirmed 10 people were killed in tiger attacks in the fiscal year just ended — the first rise in human-tiger conflict after four consecutive years of decline, and a direct consequence of more tigers sharing a park system that has not grown any bigger. Bardiya, in particular, now holds roughly one tiger for every 7–8 square kilometres of its 968 sq km, a density conservationists say is close to what the landscape can support without more tigers ranging outside protected boundaries into farmland and villages. 'We cannot change the behaviour of tigers, but we can certainly change our own,' one park official told reporters, while another added that 'a healthy tiger does not deliberately hunt people' — the attacks are almost always accidental encounters at forest edges, not predation.

What this means for travellers

Chitwan remains the most accessible base for this — a short flight or drive from Kathmandu or Pokhara, with jeep and canoe safaris run by government-registered naturalist guides. Bardiya, further west and quieter, now offers a real (if slightly lower) chance of a sighting too, in a park with a fraction of Chitwan's visitor numbers. Either way, Nepal's tiger recovery is one of the rare good-news conservation stories with a visible, bookable payoff: the same parks doing the conserving are the ones you can actually visit.

Source: The Kathmandu Post, reporting the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation's National Tiger and Prey Base Survey 2026.

Cover photo: Ambish Kazi via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).