rare species-red panda

The red panda (which is much smaller than the giant panda resembles a raccoon in size and appearance. The red panda weighs 3 - 6 kg (7 - 13 lb). It lives in mountain forests with a bamboo understory, at altitudes generally between 1500 and 4800 m (5000 - 15,700'). Red pandas almost exclusively eat bamboo. They are good tree climbers and spend most of their time in trees when not foraging. A female red panda picks a location such as a tree hollow or rock crevice for a maternal den, where she will bear 1 - 5 young. Red pandas are solitary, except for the mating period and the time when a mother and its young are together.

The red panda is found in a mountainous band from Nepal through northeastern India and  Bhutan and into China, Laos and northern Myanmar. It is rare and continues to decline. It has already become extinct in 4 of the 7 Chinese provinces in which it was previously found. The major threats to red pandas are loss and fragmentation of habitat due to deforestation (and the resulting loss of  bamboo) for timber, fuel and agricultural land; poaching for the pet and fur trades; and competition from domestic livestock.

rare animals in nepal

Starting in the 1980s wildlife officials introduced 72 of the rare rhinos to a protected valley about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of Nepal's capital city of Kathmandu as part of a conservation program.

"We have records showing 23 rhinos had died due to poaching or other causes. The rest are missing," Laxmi Prasad Manandhar, a senior official at Nepal's Department of National Park and Wildlife Conservation, told the Reuters news service.

"Where did they go? I have no answer. It is a mystery,"The species is also found in the wild in the northeast Indian state of Assam.

In Nepal, army units stationed inside the national parks once effectively deterred poachers and helped the country's rhinos rally from about 60 animals in the mid-20th century to more than 500 in 2000. But Nepal's recently ended civil war hampered conservation efforts and fueled the poaching of rhinos and other wildlife.

 

Royal Chitwan National Park, Nepal's largest rhino stronghold, has seen its population fall from 544 of the animals in 2000 to 372 in 2005

Poachers usually kill rhinos for the animals' horns, which are valuable in Chinese medicine. The massive carcasses are then left to rot.
"The truth is that even back in 1975 I was told [by local people] not to go into the Babai Valley, because there were a lot of poachers there and it was very rough. There has been poaching there since long before there the [Maoist] insurgency," he said.
As for the missing carcasses, Dinerstein suggests that many factors could have caused them to disappear.
He's seen local Nepalese carry off the remains of a rhino that died naturally.
"Every part of the animal was considered valuable," he said. "There wasn't a shred of that rhino left."
The reserve's animal denizens may have also played a part.
"There are lots of scavengers on the [southern plain known as the] Terai—mammals, birds, lots of species," Dinerstein said.
"If somebody had been patrolling they would have been tipped off [to a dead rhino] by lots of vultures.
"But because nobody was patrolling, you could easily have a carcass disappear quite quickly without much of a trace."