LUMBINI, Nepal — Legend has it that before he became the Buddha, a young Prince Siddhartha Gautama nursed an injured sarus crane (Antigone antigone) back to health. Since then, the bird and the faith have been closely intertwined, and nowhere more so than in Lumbini gardens in Nepal, hailed as the birthplace of the Buddha.
Yet with the recent commemoration of Vesak, the holiest festival in Buddhism, marking the birth, enlightenment and death of the Buddha, the fate of the sarus crane in Lumbini looks grim.
Sajrudin Musalman grew up here seeing the birds wherever he went, he tells Mongabay. They would drift gracefully over his home and fields, sparking wonder and delight, he says.
“When cranes came close, it felt like something out of this world,” says Musalman, now 72, who lives near the ancient ruins believed to mark the Buddha’s birthplace. “We’d scour the fields for their nests, thrilled just to find their eggs.”
Things have changed in the intervening decades. Musalman is the mayor now, and he doesn’t see as many cranes as before. Unplanned urbanization and land-use change in Lumbini have pushed the sarus crane out of its habitat and slashed its population.
Musalman’s views are echoed by others in the region. A recent study incorporating responses from 459 people across four districts in Lumbini province reported that 59% of respondents said they believed the range of the bird has shrunk in the past decade. They identified habitat loss and degradation (44%), hunting (19%) and wetland deterioration (16%) as the most prominent threats to the species.
“In the past, ponds and water sources dotted the land around our homes and farms,” Musalman says. “Now, they’ve been paved over, replaced by plotted land and concrete. The cranes are disappearing with the wetlands.”
Sarus cranes have historically been associated with wetlands; the bird’s name comes from the Sanskrit word sarasa, meaning “the bird of the lake.” The species is classified as vulnerable to extinction on the IUCN Red List, and in Nepal is one of just nine birds that are nationally protected.
A first-of-its-kind study in 2024 showed that the crane’s major habitat in the country is Lumbini province, and within this region the districts of Rupandehi and Kapilvastu. The study recorded 690 cranes in the province, half of them in Rupandehi, the district that encompasses the Buddhist pilgrimage site of the Lumbini gardens. Within the 200-hectare (500-acre) Lubini gardens itself, there are just four pairs of cranes, according to the Lumbini Development Trust, the government-run entity that manages the site.
“We can’t say whether the number of cranes has increased or decreased because we don’t have historical records,” says Hem Bahadur Katuwal, a Nepali wildlife researcher and assistant professor at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in China. “However, as urbanization and drought are major threats for cranes, in the next 10-15 years, all habitats may dry out.”
While climate change may have played a role, it’s rapid and unplanned urbanization that’s contributed most to reduced rainwater infiltration in Nepal’s urban areas. Paving over the soil for roads, buildings and other infrastructure in areas around the Lumbini gardens has increased by 60% over the past two decades, according to municipal records. Even within the gardens themselves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Lumbini Development Trust has allowed the construction of buildings not incorporated into the site’s master plan, which was drawn up in 1978 by Japanese professor and architect Kenzo Tange with the help of the United Nations.
“Twenty years ago, we had plenty of farmland,” says Rajaram Biswokarma, 58, another longtime resident. “Now, buildings stand where crops once grew.”
When Lumbini was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1997, UNESCO took the Lumbini master plan as the basis for acceptance. That’s made the unplanned developments of recent years, in particular the paving over of green spaces with concrete, a concern for UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee. In June 2024, the committee made public a draft decision to place the Lumbini gardens on its List of World Heritage in Danger. However, the draft was later amended to remove that proposal.
Gyanin Rai, senior administration officer of the Lumbini Development Trust, acknowledges that infrastructure development and overcrowding have affected cranes and other birds in Lumbini. The 2024 study found that between 2009 and 2023, 47 cranes were killed by electrocution or collision with power lines in the Lumbini area.
The ongoing construction of a cultural center and convention hall that can accommodate 5,000 people is at the heart of UNESCO’s concerns. The 1 billion rupee ($7.3 million) project was never in the Lumbini master plan.
In 1994, concerned by the lack of protection for the area’s cranes, the International Crane Foundation signed an agreement with the Lumbini Development Trust to lease 104 hectares (256 acres) of land for 50 years to establish and run the Lumbini Crane Sanctuary, which would serve as a safe haven for the birds. But the trust has allocated some of that land to a private company for agriculture. When Mongabay visited the area, it was replete with concrete poles erected to farm nonnative dragon fruit, a lucrative commodity.
Mahendra Shrestha, vice president of the Asia program at the International Crane Foundation, said commercial activities within the crane sanctuary area are impacting the bird’s habitat.
Rai, from the trust, acknowledges that “The land was not provided through the official process — it was granted through personal access, bypassing formal procedures.” He points to Awadhdesh Tripathi, the trust’s vice chair at the time, as having allocated the land to the private company. Mongabay attempted to contact Tripathi for comment, but he was unavailable.
“This problem has arisen because the Department of Archaeology and the Lumbini Development Trust have not taken the issue seriously as they should have,” Rai says. As Buddhists around the world marked Vesak last week, many in the faith have highlighted the plight of the Lumbini gardens and called for an end to the “concretization” of the Buddha’s birthplace. To build monuments like the convention center at the expense of wildlife habitat goes against the ethos of Buddha’s teachings, scholars say.
“Siddhartha Gautama Buddha did not advocate idol worship. He was against it,” says Karma Sangbo, a practitioner of Samatha and Vipashyana meditation and former vice chair of the Lumbini Development Trust. “All knowledge can be gained through meditation — that was the essence of Buddhist learning.”
Banner Image: A sarus crane photographed in Lumbini. Image by Mukesh Pokhrel.
Citations:
Bhattarai, B. P., Katuwal, H. B., Regmi, S., Nepali, A., Suwal, R. N., Acharya, R., … Sharma, H. P. (2025). Knowledge, attitudes, and conservation threats to globally vulnerable sarus cranes in Lumbini Province, Nepal. Discover Conservation, 2(1). doi:10.1007/s44353-025-00034-2
Sharma, H. P., Katuwal, H. B., Regmi, S., Suwal, R. N., Acharya, R., Nepali, A., … Bhattarai, B. P. (2024). Population and conservation threats to the vulnerable sarus crane Grus antigone in Nepal. Ecology and Evolution, 14(2). doi:10.1002/ece3.10929
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