Forest Guardians

Thirty-eight people from the villages of Ilam and Panchthar, paid a full wage to walk, watch and protect the forest their families have lived beside for generations.

Guardians planting seedlings on a misty forest slope

The people who know the forest best.

Most red panda habitat in eastern Nepal sits outside national parks, in community forests owned and managed by the villages around them. That means the people deciding its future are farmers, herders and their families, not park rangers.

Forest Guardians turns that local knowledge into protection. Each guardian is responsible for a mapped patrol route of roughly 30 hectares. They check camera traps, record red panda signs such as droppings and feeding marks, and report cutting, snares and grazing damage to their community forest user group.

Guardians are hired and trained by us but answer to their own village. That keeps the program accountable to the people who live with its results, and it means the work continues when our staff are not there.

At a glance

Started

2019

Guardians employed

Of them, women

Hectares patrolled

1,240

Patrol km per month

~2,100

Fund a guardian

A guardian’s year

The patrol calendar follows the red panda’s.

Red panda activity shifts with the seasons, so patrol priorities do too.

Jan – Mar

Mating season

Pairs meet along forest edges. Guardians focus on stopping winter firewood cutting in core breeding areas.

Apr – May

Nest checks

Females look for tree hollows. Patrols map old trees with cavities and mark them for protection.

Jun – Sep

Cubs and monsoon

Cubs are born and stay hidden. Trails are slippery, so patrols shift to camera checks and village outreach.

Oct – Dec

Survey season

Dry weather means the annual population survey. Every guardian walks their full transect twice.

The job

What a guardian does.

Guardians spend about 12 days a month in the forest. The rest of their time goes to their own farms and to meetings with the forest user group.

Patrol and record

Each patrol follows a mapped route. Guardians log red panda droppings, feeding signs and direct sightings in a phone app that works offline and syncs when they reach signal.

Maintain camera traps

They change batteries and memory cards every four weeks and move cameras when a route goes quiet. Every image is reviewed by a guardian before it reaches our research team.

Report threats

Illegal cutting, snares, stray dogs and overgrazing are reported to the forest user group, which decides how to respond under its own rules.

Guardians visit schools each term and run the village screenings of camera-trap footage, which have become the most popular event of the year in several villages.