Nepal Tripled Its Wild Tigers. On July 29, the World Finds Out If It Did It Again.

In 2009, when Nepal ran its first serious camera-trap count of wild tigers, the number that came back was 121. Nobody expected what happened next: by 2022, that figure had climbed to 355 — nearly tripling in thirteen years, inside a country smaller than the U.S. state of Arkansas. Nepal didn't just hit the global target conservationists had set for it. It blew past it by more than 100 tigers. On 29 July 2026 — International Tiger Day — the results of Nepal's fifth national tiger census will reveal whether that growth has continued.

The counting method matters here. Nepal doesn't estimate its tigers from paw prints or guesswork — since 2009 it has used camera traps that photograph the unique stripe pattern on each animal, the same way a fingerprint identifies a person. Every four years or so, thousands of motion-triggered cameras go up across the parks that hold Nepal's tiger population: Chitwan, Parsa, Bardiya, Banke and Shuklaphanta. The 2025–26 count began installing cameras on 16 December across three blocks — Chitwan-Parsa, Banke-Bardiya, and Shuklaphanta-Laljhadi — with fieldwork in the Chitwan-Parsa block alone running more than two months.

What makes Nepal's number so unusual is the scale of the ambition it beat. In 2010, leaders from thirteen tiger-range countries — from Russia to India to Indonesia — met in St Petersburg and pledged to double the world's wild tiger population by 2022, a target known in conservation circles as "Tx2". Most countries fell short. Nepal became one of the very first nations to actually hit its Tx2 goal, then kept going: instead of doubling from 121 to roughly 240–250, it climbed to 355, very nearly tripling.

The cost of success

Our guides who work the buffer zones around Chitwan will tell you the tiger comeback isn't free. A near-tripling of a large predator's population inside one of the most densely farmed river valleys in Asia means more tigers moving through community forests, more livestock kills, and more encounters with people gathering firewood or grass at the forest edge. Between July 2021 and July 2022 alone, tigers killed 16 people around Chitwan National Park — compared with 10 deaths from tiger attacks across the previous five years combined, according to Chitwan-based biologist Babu Ram Lamichhane.

Census coordinators say this round is measuring more than a headcount. Haribhadra Acharya, the senior ecologist coordinating the count, has said the goal this time is "not only to count tigers but also to understand habitat quality, prey availability and human pressures" — data that will shape how close to villages Nepal lets its tiger population keep growing. Whatever number comes back on 29 July, it will be read two ways at once in Nepal: as one of the great conservation turnarounds of the last twenty years, and as a live question about how many large predators one of the world's most crowded lowland valleys can safely hold.

For travellers, the takeaway is straightforward: Chitwan and Bardiya are, right now, near-guaranteed places to see a wild tiger with a professional guide, at a moment when that population is at its highest recorded level in modern Nepali history. Book a jungle safari and you're seeing the live, numbered result of one of the more remarkable wildlife recoveries anywhere on the planet.

Source: The Kathmandu Post; historical figures via IUCN and National Geographic.

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