KATHMANDU Fifty-six year-old Kaluram Bote has awaited the end of February, which marks a crucial time for gharial breeding in Chitwan, between Nepal’s Terai and hilly regions. Rowing his boat in the Rapti River, he sets off on an early morning hunt for gharial eggs and fetches them back to the breeding center. For […]
KATHMANDU The start of 2024 has brought some good news, tempered with warnings, for Nepal’s critically endangered gharials, the fish-eating crocodiles with the comically bulbous snouts. Officials at Chitwan National Park, the country’s prime habitat for gharials (Gavialis gangeticus), one of two crocodile species found in Nepal, say their population increased by around 11% […]
KATHMANDU On the morning of July 31, a tiger (Panthera tigris) entered the enclosure of the Kasara gharial breeding center in National Park unnoticed. It observed the behavior of the crocodiles for a while and then attacked and killed three of them. Before staffers arrived at the site, the tiger ate one of the gharials […]
KATHMANDU Something occurred to Phoebe Griffith as she observed gharial and mugger crocodiles in and around Nepal’s Chitwan National Park, she recalls. Both crocodiles live in the same environment, and from the neck down they’re everything one would expect a crocodile to look like. But the similarities end there. “Gharials are critically endangered, they […]