Pangolin Conservation in Bhutan: Protecting Manis crassicaudata in the Eastern Himalayas

Bhutan occupies a singular position in global biodiversity conservation. Its constitutional mandate to maintain at least 60 percent forest cover—a threshold the country currently exceeds, with roughly 71 percent of its land under forest—creates a legal and cultural foundation that few nations can match. Yet even within this framework, the Indian pangolin (Manis crassicaudata) faces mounting pressure from poaching, cross-border trafficking, and the slow but measurable effects of a warming climate. Understanding how Bhutan approaches pangolin conservation reveals both the strengths of a philosophy that places ecological wellbeing at the centre of national development, and the hard realities of protecting a secretive, nocturnal animal in rugged terrain.

Bhutan's Conservation Philosophy and Legal Framework

The concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH), articulated by the Fourth Druk Gyalpo and enshrined in the 2008 Constitution, frames conservation not as a regulatory burden but as one of four pillars of national wellbeing. Environmental conservation sits alongside sustainable socio-economic development, good governance, and the preservation of culture. This framing has practical consequences: protected areas are not treated as zones of exclusion to be minimised, but as assets whose integrity is bound up with Bhutanese identity.

The legal cornerstone for wildlife protection is the Wildlife Act of 2007, which prohibits the hunting, capture, trade, and possession of protected species, including all pangolins. The Act establishes penalties for violations and provides the basis for wildlife crime prosecution. Complementing this legislation, the National Biodiversity Centre (NBC), operating under the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, coordinates biodiversity research, genetic inventories, and policy guidance. The Royal Society for Protection of Nature (RSPN), the country's oldest and most prominent non-governmental conservation organisation, supports field surveys, community outreach, and international advocacy on species including pangolins.

Bhutan's network of protected areas covers approximately 51 percent of the country, and biological corridors link these zones into a connected system. This connectivity matters enormously for wide-ranging or habitat-sensitive species like the Indian pangolin, which requires intact scrub forest, grassland edges, and termite-rich soils across elevational gradients.

Habitat and Range: Where Indian Pangolins Live in Bhutan

The Indian pangolin in Bhutan is found primarily in the southern and central lowlands, where subtropical and warm broadleaf forests give way to the foothills bordering the Indian states of Assam and West Bengal. Three protected areas are of particular importance.

Royal Manas National Park, contiguous with India's Manas Tiger Reserve across the international boundary, provides large tracts of lowland subtropical forest and alluvial grassland that support pangolin populations alongside tigers, Asian elephants, and greater one-horned rhinoceroses. Phipsoo Wildlife Sanctuary, situated in the southwestern corner of Bhutan, protects chir pine and mixed broadleaf forest and is known for relatively intact terrestrial ant and termite communities on which pangolins depend. Jigme Singye Wangchuck National Park, located in the central belt, covers a broader elevational range and may support pangolins at its lower altitudinal limits, though systematic surveys here remain limited.

Community forests in the southern dzongkhags (districts) such as Sarpang, Gelephu, Tsirang, and Samtse also represent significant, if underappreciated, habitat. Community forest management groups in these areas control timber extraction, regulate access, and in some cases conduct informal wildlife monitoring. The degree to which these forests serve as functional pangolin habitat, and the extent to which community members are aware of pangolin presence, varies considerably by location and has not been systematically documented at a national scale.

Threats: Poaching, Trafficking, and the Southern Border

Despite strong legal protections and relatively high forest cover, the Indian pangolin in Bhutan faces serious threats, the most immediate of which is poaching. Wire snares set for bushmeat species—particularly in the southern foothills where subsistence hunting has cultural roots among some communities near the Indian border—catch pangolins incidentally and intentionally. Because pangolin scales command high prices in international markets, a single animal can represent significant income for a rural household, creating economic incentives that are difficult to counter through awareness campaigns alone.

Traditional medicine demand, both domestic and across the border, adds a further layer of pressure. While the use of pangolin scales is not a prominent feature of traditional Bhutanese medicine systems in the way it is in parts of East and Southeast Asia, proximity to markets in India—and through India, to smuggling networks linking South Asia to China—means that demand from outside the country directly affects Bhutanese pangolin populations. Seizure records from Bhutan's borders and from Indian customs posts in Assam indicate a trafficking corridor running northward from the Brahmaputra lowlands through the Himalayan foothills. Pangolins and scales moved through this corridor are typically destined for transit through Myanmar or directly overland into Yunnan province.

The porous nature of Bhutan's southern border with Assam complicates enforcement. Road and forest trail crossings are numerous, and the terrain is difficult to patrol comprehensively. Joint operations between Bhutanese forest officers and Indian wildlife authorities under bilateral agreements have resulted in some seizures, but the scale of cross-border trade in wildlife products remains inadequately quantified for pangolins specifically.

Research Gaps and Camera Trap Surveys

One of the most significant challenges in pangolin conservation anywhere in the world is the lack of baseline population data, and Bhutan is no exception. The Indian pangolin is nocturnal, solitary, and moves through dense vegetation; it is rarely detected by standard wildlife survey methods. Camera trap grids deployed for tigers and other large mammals occasionally record pangolins as bycatch, but these detections are not designed to generate density estimates for the species.

The NBC and RSPN have both supported targeted pangolin surveys in select locations, and international partnerships with organisations working across the South Asian pangolin range have contributed methodological guidance. However, a systematic, nationally representative camera trap survey designed specifically for pangolins has not yet been conducted in Bhutan. This gap means that conservation managers lack the baseline occupancy and abundance estimates needed to assess whether populations are stable, increasing, or declining in response to threats or protective interventions.

Sign-based surveys—recording burrow entrances, claw marks on termite mounds, and trail evidence—offer a lower-cost complement to camera trapping, and community-based monitoring programmes in southern dzongkhags could extend survey coverage if properly designed and supported. Local knowledge held by farmers, forest guards, and community forest management groups represents an underutilised data source that structured citizen science programmes could begin to harness.

Climate Change and the Compressing Habitat Problem

Bhutan's forests are moving uphill. As mean annual temperatures rise across the Eastern Himalayas, tree lines shift to higher elevations, altering the composition and distribution of vegetation zones. For the Indian pangolin, which is adapted to warm subtropical and tropical conditions, this creates a habitat compression problem: the lowland and foothill zones it occupies are simultaneously being affected by agricultural encroachment from below and a slow upward migration of competing forest types from above.

The implications are not yet well modelled for Bhutan specifically. Research conducted across the broader Himalayan region suggests that species with narrow thermal tolerances and specialised dietary requirements—pangolins depend almost exclusively on ants and termites, whose own distributions are temperature-sensitive—may face range contractions that are not immediately apparent in remotely sensed forest cover data. A landscape that appears to retain high forest cover may nonetheless support reduced prey availability if ant and termite community composition shifts with changing temperature and moisture regimes.

Integrating climate vulnerability assessments into protected area management planning is an ongoing priority for Bhutan's Department of Forests and Park Services. Whether and how pangolin-specific climate projections will be incorporated into that planning depends in part on the availability of species distribution data—which returns the discussion to the critical research gaps identified above.