The number of tigers (click here) living in the wild in Nepal has leapt. A new survey shows Royal Bengal tigers now number 198 -- that's 63% more than four years ago.
The country's efforts are part of a global program to pull tigers back from the brink of extinction.
The government survey from Nepal was released Monday, on World Tiger Day, at a meeting of conservationists and wildlife experts in the nation's capital, Katmandu, according to the French news agency, Agence France-Presse.
Experts chalked up the gains in Nepal to a crackdown on poaching and better management of the tigers' habitat.
The wider tiger conservation program, known as TX2, was launched in 2010 by countries that have wild tigers. Their goal is to double the number of tigers by 2022, the next Year of the Tiger.
In 2010, there were as few as 3,200 tigers left in the wild, "putting the animals on the brink of extinction," according to the World Wildlife Fund conservation group.
Nepal’s results "are an important milestone to reaching the global TX2 goal," said Megh Bahadur Pandey, director-general of Nepal’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, in a news release.
According to WWF, one of the world's greatest concentrations of tigers is found in the Terai Arc Landscape. The region, believed to hold about 500 tigers, covers 600 miles and 15 protected areas in Nepal and India....
