Nepal's Rhinos Fell to Under 100 Animals. The Last Count Found 752.

Chitwan National Park's tall elephant grass hides one of conservation's genuine comeback stories, and most visitors gliding past on a jeep safari never hear the numbers behind it. The greater one-horned rhinoceros — the armour-plated, single-horned animal found almost nowhere outside Nepal and northeast India — was hunted down to fewer than 100 individuals in Nepal by the 1960s. The most recent national count found 752.

A population that crashed twice — and recovered twice

The rhino's Nepal story is not a straight line upward. Conservationists put the population at roughly 1,000 animals in the early 1950s, before land clearance for resettlement and hunting collapsed it to under 100 by the 1960s. A first national census in 1994 counted 466 rhinos, and the population kept climbing to 612 by 2000. Then Nepal's decade-long Maoist insurgency emptied army posts from the parks, and poachers moved back in: the population fell again, to 409 by the 2005 count. Since then it has climbed in every subsequent census — 645 by 2015, 752 by 2021 — the strongest sustained recovery the species has had in Nepal in seventy years.

Where the rhinos actually are

The 2021 count, run by the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation with the National Trust for Nature Conservation over three weeks from late March, broke the total down park by park.

The turnaround since 2005 rests on a specific model: army battalions posted permanently inside the parks, plus more than 400 community-run anti-poaching units recruited from the buffer-zone villages that border them, sharing intelligence on trespassers and snares. It is that layered, locally staffed patrol network — not a single technology or a single law — that conservation groups credit with the run of zero-poaching years Nepal has posted since 2011. A full national census has not been repeated since 2021; budget shortfalls pushed back the next count, and Nepal's wildlife department now plans to run it using genetic sampling rather than the older direct-sighting method, with results still pending.

What this means for trekkers

A Chitwan jungle safari puts you in rhino habitat directly, with jeep drives, a dugout canoe float down the Rapti River and guided walks through the same buffer-zone community forests the anti-poaching units patrol; Nepal's other rhino stronghold, Bardia, is covered on a dedicated Bardia National Park safari for a quieter, less-visited version of the same wildlife.

Sources: Kathmandu Post, National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC), World Wildlife Fund and Mongabay.

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