South Asia News

KATHMANDU — It starts off like the premise for a joke: “Why did the tigers cross the road?” But for researchers and conservationists in Nepal, the spread of roads throughout…

Considering the invasive nature of the species, Bangladesh has finally banned the cultivation, breeding, transportation, sale and conservation of suckermouth catfish (Hypostomus plecostomus), as it gradually encroaches on local water…

KATHMANDU — When NASA’s Earth Observatory published a post on its website earlier this year describing how Nepal had regenerated its forests between 1992 and 2016, it received a lot…

KATHMANDU — One of the ways people living in the western Himalayas of India, Pakistan and Nepal know that the spring season has started is by listening to male cheer…

HABARANA, Sri Lanka — As a four-day reggae, rock and hip hop music fiesta got underway Feb. 17, putting many wild animals inhabiting a forest reserve in Habarana in Sri…

DHAKA — As Bangladesh authorities prepare to declare the  country’s largest freshwater wetland a Ramsar site, its two other designated wetlands of international importance, including the Sundarbans, continue to come…

Kalpitiya, SRI LANKA: The Feb. 11 beaching of 14 pilot whales in Kalpitiya, about 172 kilometers (107 miles) from the capital, Colombo, may have occurred due to the recent seismic…

KATHMANDU — On Nov. 1 last year, a leopard dragged off an 8-year-old boy as he was playing just steps away from the cowshed where his grandmother was milking the…

COLOMBO — The Singapore-flagged X-Press Pearl was a brand-new container ship, only three months after being commissioned, when a fire erupted and began sinking off Sri Lanka’s western coast on May 20,…

Think of a tropical rainforest being cleared for an oil palm plantation, and the first animal that comes to mind is probably an orangutan. But there’s another tree-dwelling species, not…

KATHMANDU — A popular dish in Nepal, momos are small, bite-sized dumplings filled with spicy minced meat and wrapped in dough. Served piping hot, they are often accompanied by a…

KATHMANDU — If you were a grumpy cat, you’d probably want to avoid company. And if you were the world’s grumpiest, as David Attenborough once described the elusive manul, what…

KATHMANDU — Climate change is likely to expand the habitat of leopards in the Nepal’s high mountain regions, potentially increasing conflict with humans and competition with snow leopards, a new…

COLOMBO — Each day, as the sun set over the horizon, Thettuwage Tennakoon and his wife would carefully climb up into their treehouse in the middle of their rice field.…

The indiscriminate use of gillnets by fishers in Bangladesh has become a major threat to the two freshwater dolphin species found there: the Ganga River dolphin (Platanista gangetica) and the…

During a dietary study on fishing cats living near Colombo, Sri Lanka, researchers made an unexpected finding: Some scat samples collected contained plastics. Varying in size from tiny microplastics to…

KATHMANDU — When residents of Pokhara Valley in western Nepal spot Egyptian vultures nesting on cliffs and trees, they sometimes misidentify them as crows and shoo them away. Sometimes they…

KATHMANDU — When residents of Nandapur village on the western fringes of Nepal’s Chitwan National Park rushed to the scene of a rhino death near the Narayani River on Jan.…

COLOMBO — When Uditha Hettige started out doing field excursions in 1990, in search of Sri Lanka’s rich bird life, he would visit Bodhinagala Forest Reserve in the country’s west…

The village of Rukubji, in Bhutan’s central Wangdue Phodrang district, lies in a valley at the intersection of three rivers, its surrounding hillsides scattered with yak herder tents or swathed…

KATHMANDU — On the morning of Jan. 16, the day after Yeti Airlines Flight 691 crashed near Pokhara International Airport in Nepal, killing all 72 people on board, authorities at…

KATHMANDU — When Tulshi Laxmi Suwal was a student in the zoology department at Tribhuvan University in Nepal, she looked through an encyclopedia in search of interesting animals for her…

DHAKA — On July 20 last year, representatives from 11 NGOs held a joint protest against a government decision to establish a FIFA-funded training facility inside a reserved forest. The…

KATHMANDU — During his regular patrol in the forests of Dadeldhura district in Nepal’s westernmost tip in 2020, forester Bishnu Prasad Acharya heard something strange from a temple priest. “He…

DHAKA – In the hopes of becoming overnight millionaires, five wildlife traffickers tried to sell a tokay gecko (Gekko gecko), locally known as takkhak, in Bangladesh’s border district of Panchagarh.…

In an effort to feed 170 million people in a rapidly growing economy, Bangladeshi farmers rely on the widespread use of chemical fertilizers to boost production, leaving the country’s soil…

KATHMANDU — The country received accolades and applause from all around the world for its success in conserving the endangered species. However, with the growing number of big cats, attacks…

KATHMANDU – Thousands of pilgrims from Nepal and India visit a garden in Siraha in eastern Nepal on the first day of the Nepali New Year (around the second week…

KATHMANDU — Pictures of enigmatic snow leopards roaming the scenic Annapurna area come to mind when outsiders think about carnivores and predators in the Himalayas. The cats often grab the…

KATHMANDU — Throughout 2022, Mongabay reported on important biodiversity-related scientific discoveries in Nepal. The stories, some of them republished by different media outlets in Nepal and abroad, brought the country’s…