Nepal Is About the Size of Illinois. It's Home to Nearly 8% of All the Birds on Earth.

Fly into Kathmandu from almost anywhere and you cross more bird habitat in ninety minutes of descent than most countries have altogether. Nepal runs from the sweltering, 90-metre-high wetlands of Koshi Tappu near the Indian border to the wind-scoured ridgelines above 8,000 metres on Everest and Kanchenjunga — and somewhere in that vertical sweep, researchers have logged more than 900 distinct bird species. That is close to a tenth of every bird species alive, inside a country roughly the footprint of Illinois.

The number itself is not new — Nepal's bird list has been building for decades. What is new is a study published this month by researchers including Kamal Raj Gosai and Hem Bahadur Katuwal, which surveyed 135 of the country's birdwatchers and found a gap that is holding conservation back: most of what they see never reaches anyone who could use it. Only 37% of respondents said they regularly log sightings on citizen-science platforms such as eBird or pass them to conservation groups; 46% said they keep their notebooks private. This helps in fulfilling the data gaps related to bird population and habitat, Katuwal said of the case for sharing, pointing out that basic details — species, count, exact location — feed directly into how reserves are managed and which corridors get protected.

The stakes are real. A 2021-2022 survey of the Bagmati River corridor through Kathmandu found just 67 species where more than 100 had once been recorded — a quiet local collapse driven by encroachment and pollution that nobody would have quantified without birdwatchers doing the counting. Bird Conservation Nepal, led by CEO Ishana Thapa, has spent years trying to turn a growing hobby into a functioning early-warning system for the country's wetlands, forests and grasslands.

Where the birds actually are

The diversity is not evenly spread — it clusters at a handful of sites that any visiting birder can reach without a trekking permit:

One guide, Shankar Tiwari, a 57-year-old who founded the ecotourism outfit Travel Nepal, currently tops Nepal's eBird leaderboard with 516 species personally logged — a career built almost entirely on the shift from hunting birds, which he did as a young man, to guiding paying visitors toward them instead. The study found birders spend up to 40,000 rupees (about $260) per trip on guides, permits and lodges chasing species lists, a small but growing wildlife-tourism economy running alongside Nepal's trekking business.

What this means for trekkers

Source: Mongabay

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