Spotting tigers, missing links: What’s undermining tiger conservation in Bangladesh?

It was a gentle, chilly morning in 2023 when I came closest to a tiger's raw, unfiltered presence. In Chitwan, our gypsy had just started its safari, the track flanked by sal trees and thick undergrowth, and the horizon immersed in unending tall elephant grasses. I was anticipating an encounter with a tiger, my camera settings attuned to the morning sun. 

As my colleagues shared their experiences of tiger sightings, a tigress suddenly leapt out of the bush right in the middle of the track. Her fully stretched body — black stripes and golden fur — glistened under the clear morning sun. We startled her as much as she startled us. We locked eyes for a brief second, and, before I could move my camera, she disappeared into the forest. 

That fleeting moment, shared in stunned silence with Dr Yadvendradev Jhala, Dr Uma Ramakrishnan, and others, remains etched in my memory.

I have never again experienced such a moment in the Sundarbans. Even after years of visiting the world's largest mangrove forest, the closest encounter was limited to hearing distant roars. 

The tigers we have lost

My awe for tigers mostly stems from their tragic history of extinction — the silence of places where tigers no longer tread. Iran, Iraq, Turkey, South Korea, Vietnam — all these countries once had their respective subspecies of tigers. But war, prolonged political conflict, colonial occupation, and industrial hunting have played their roles in the extinctions. 

In South Korea, Amur tigers were the casualty of early 1900s occupation by Imperial Japan. During that period, the Indonesian archipelago still practiced Rampokan, a ritual of spearing tigers to fend off evil in the month of Ramadan. The Javan tiger bade farewell too. 

For the Caspian tigers in the Middle East, the stories are tied to WWII and post-WWII conflicts. In Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War, napalms, agent orange and subsequent spikes in wildlife hunting played their part in the erasure of Indochinese tigers. 

Every time I think about how tigers roamed those parts of the world, as recently as during the lifetime of my grandfather, and I teach the human-tiger relationship in my classes, my eyes fill up with tears, partly in grief, partly in anger. 

Today, tigers survive largely in South Asia, certain pockets of Southeast Asia and the Far East, often by chance, and sometimes by sheer resilience. Every surviving tiger bears the weight of all the ones we have lost due to human atrocities. 

The Sundarbans tigers

The case of Bengal tigers is different. This subspecies of tiger used to roam widely in the 1900s, from the streets of Yangon to the outskirts of Dhaka. Centuries of game hunting led to its demise. 

In Colonial Bengal, tiger hunting was a rite of passage. There are numerous tales of daring confrontations, of men armed with spears or matchlocks venturing into the wilderness, of royal jungle beatings to flush out tigers. These stories live on, mostly romanticised, particularly the ones told by local hunter elites and landlords. 

The traces of resentment over killing such a majestic beast, and the reasoning that paved the way for such a killing, can only be found in the stories of Jim Corbett. With this exception, most anecdotes were about how colonial rulers killed tigers here and there with the help of local lackeys. For a professional in wildlife biology, such stories are always heavy on the psyche and have little literary value other than keeping track of extinction.

As late as the 1960s, tigers were hunted in Madhupur, Chattogram, Moulvibazar, and Panchagarh. These are all history today. It is even hard to imagine Kamrangir Char and Purana Paltan, now consumed by Dhaka, as once tiger habitats. 

Forests of Madhupur, Moulvibazar and Panchagarh are either gone or past their heyday. The presence of tigers in the Hill Tracts is now a topic of hot debate. In Bangladesh, tigers have a somewhat stable population only in the Sundarbans. 

Global uproar, local whisper

International Tiger Day is marked with celebration and pride. The global Tx2 goal — an ambitious initiative launched at the 2010 St Petersburg Tiger Summit, where 13 tiger-range countries pledged to double wild tiger populations by 2022. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Nepal and India met the target. Bhutan and Russia came impressively close. 

Bangladesh? Despite being one of the 13 tiger-range countries and committed to the goal, it is unlikely to double its tiger population, even if it wanted to.

Not for lack of trying, but perhaps for a lack of perception about reality. In Sundarbans, two robust camera-trapping surveys were carried out to count tigers, led by the Bangladesh Forest Department. In 2018, the mean population estimate was 106 (95% confidence interval 84–130); in 2024, it was 125 tigers (100–156). 

Authorities estimated it as approximately a 9% increase, but, as the intervals are grossly overlapping, we must be careful about such interpretations. Rather, these numbers hint at the tiger carrying capacity of the Sundarbans. For Tx2, we must look outward to other potential tiger habitats.

Vanishing forests, stalled research

But tiger habitats in Bangladesh continue to disappear. Once home to vibrant mangrove ecosystems, Chakaria Sundarbans in southeastern Bangladesh, a potential tiger habitat, has now disappeared. A report last week highlighted its complete loss. 

The Hill Tracts have several unverified and verified records of tigers. The area underwent massive changes in the last two decades, but conservation and research initiatives are nearly non-existent. Disappearance of tiger habitats is not isolated — it is a pattern. And when habitats disappear, predators follow.

Radio-collaring efforts — once a breakthrough in tiger ecology — have largely stopped in Bangladesh. Following the debacle of tiger deaths reported soon after the collaring efforts, field-based behavioral research seems to have halted, perhaps indefinitely.

The last major study focused on prey density in 2025, and before it, all peer-reviewed studies were almost a decade old. The gold standard camera-trap-based spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) studies on tiger density are based on null models, not considering variables like prey density, poaching pressure, etc. 

This pause is dangerous. Without updated data, every conservation effort walks blind.

Here is the anomaly: the only radio-collaring study found that two female tigers in the Sundarbans had home ranges of 12.3 and 14.2 sq km, respectively. The study published in the journal Oryx in 2011 extrapolated these numbers, suggesting that only about seven adult females could occupy 100 sq km, substantially higher than what SECR estimates imply.

The density estimates by the Bangladesh Forest Department suggested that roughly 2.5 tigers inhabit 100 sq km of the Sundarbans. 

Is it overestimation, underestimation, flawed assumptions, or methodological limitations? We don't yet know. But this divergence should caution us against blindly trusting a single method, particularly one based on a null model. 

New research angles

Imagine tigers in the Hill Tracts. Such imagination holds a seed of possibility. Regional corridors connecting the hill forests of India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh could, in theory, allow dispersal. Such corridors are essential if tiger range expansion is to be more than just a fantasy. 

But corridor plans depend on a variety of factors, largely on geopolitical synergy. One thing we can do is undertake some indicative studies, such as estimating the density of potential tiger prey. Such studies may sway the perspectives of neighbouring tiger-range countries to come above the divides and join collaborative tiger conservation activities. 

The least we can do is stop promoting orchard practices in the Hill Tracts. Mulling over tiger reintroduction and converting the Hill Tracts into farms at the same time is nothing but self-sabotage. 

Tiger science is also moving forward, though mostly outside Bangladesh. 

Genetic research is rewriting what we know about tiger subspecies and their evolutionary histories. Advances in genomics allow scientists to trace ancient tiger lineages, understand local adaptations, and assess genetic diversity within fragmented populations. 

The Sundarbans is the only example of tigers living in the mangrove. The reasons behind and the mechanism of managing such an astonishing feat are worth looking into.  

What we celebrate, what we forget

On International Tiger Day, hashtags will trend, posters will go up, and speeches will be made. We will celebrate the tiger — its majesty, mystery and might. But a celebration without self-reflection is hollow.

We must ask: Do we know enough to protect our tigers? Are we investing enough in science, surveillance, and community engagement? Are we letting politics, paperwork, and passive optimism replace real conservation?

The Sundarbans tiger, battered yet surviving, is not a success story—it's a story of endurance.