- Community-based surveys in northern Myanmar have documented a small population of white-bellied herons, one of the world’s most threatened bird species.
- Experts say the sightings reaffirm the conflict-torn area’s importance as one of the world’s few remaining strongholds for the critically endangered species.
- Several threats to the birds were identified, including opportunistic hunting using homemade guns, which the researchers plan to mitigate through outreach programs in local communities.
- The surveys were funded by a wider conservation program that aims to boost local capacity for conservation to cover diminished government support and reduced NGO presence amid Myanmar’s political crisis.
Community-led bird surveys have confirmed that one of the world’s most threatened bird species, the white-bellied heron, still survives in northern Myanmar’s Kachin state.
As few as 50 mature white-bellied herons (Ardea insignis) are thought to remain globally, confined to a handful of undisturbed forested valleys in Bhutan, northeastern India and northern Myanmar.
Their rarity comes down to their extreme dependence on large, fast-flowing, clean rivers, which means they can’t adapt to the world’s increasingly human-modified watercourses. These slender and shy fish-eaters are also notoriously flighty, easily abandoning their nests if disturbed.
With numbers dwindling across their range due to hydropower, mining, pollution, destructive fishing and climate change, the latest IUCN Red List assessment estimates their critically endangered global population at no more than 50-249 adult individuals.
Local efforts plug gaps
Led by Northern Wildlife Rangers (NWR), a local civil society group with a long history of conservation work in Kachin state, the surveys identified three to five individual white-bellied herons from 25 separate sightings in their survey area between 2022 and 2023.
The grassroots initiative was exclusively conducted by surveyors from local communities and funded by a WWF small grants program. The latter aims to boost local capacity for conservation to cover diminished government support and reduced NGO presence amid Myanmar’s political crisis triggered by a 2021 military coup.
Locally led efforts are increasingly significant in Myanmar, where the post-coup instability has seen intensified natural resource extraction, widespread lack of environmental oversight, and large conservation NGOs either significantly scaling back their operations or leaving the country altogether, the team write in a recent study published in the journal Oryx.
“Conservation is not a priority in Myanmar now,” said Thomas Gray, tiger landscape and recovery lead at WWF and a co-author of the study. “A lot of support that was going to conservation, both government support and NGO support, has been eroded.”
To maintain conservation momentum amid this diminished support, WWF-Myanmar set up a small grants program in 2021. The heron surveys are one of 26 grassroots programs funded by the program and led by civil society organizations in partnership with local communities.
“Community-based and civil society organizations are very knowledgeable and influential in their areas,” Nay Myo Shwe, head of wildlife at WWF-Myanmar and a co-author of the study, told Mongabay. “There are interest groups that care deeply about species and conservation issues and mobilize themselves.”
Lawlessness intensifies threats
The security situation restricted the heron surveys to the only two river catchments that were considered safe enough to monitor on foot: Putao-Wai Lang Dam and Nawngmung. Other promising heron habitats, such as Hukaung Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, where previous surveys between 2009 and 2011 had identified a white-bellied heron population, were inaccessible due to ongoing tensions.
The restrictions hampered direct comparisons with prior surveys, the authors note in their study, preventing them from drawing conclusions about the overall heron population trend. Experts, however, have welcomed the news of the heron’s continued presence in Myanmar as “extremely valuable information” for the overall conservation of the species.
“Every individual is important for the species to persist,” Rohan Menzies, an ornithologist at the Nature Conservation Foundation in India, who wasn’t involved in the Myanmar surveys, told Mongabay. Past data gaps from Myanmar had forced scientists to speculate, he added, which can be “dangerous when working with such low global populations.”
The surveyors also identified a suite of threats facing the herons in Kachin state, including pollution from riverbed dredging and artisanal gold mining, and the risk of entanglement in discarded fishing gear. The team also documented the first cases of white-bellied herons being killed by hunting.
“Opportunistic hunting using home-made air-pressured guns is a major threat to wildlife in the region,” the study says, adding that even though white-bellied herons are a protected species under Myanmar’s wildlife laws, the threat is “exacerbated by a lack of wildlife law enforcement as a result of the country’s political unrest.”
To reduce the risk of hunting, Northern Wildlife Rangers are now focusing on community-based education to raise awareness about the heron’s extreme rarity and to encourage people not to shoot them. “Strengthening awareness-raising efforts and implementing air gun control measures are urgent priorities,” Nay Myo Shwe said.
While the political situation makes it challenging to address large-scale threats to the herons, such as mining and industrial-scale pollution, helping local people build skills can keep conservation efforts going for the short term at least, Shwe said.
“Strengthening networking and ensuring regular technical and financial support [are vital],” he said. “As these approaches can play a critical role in addressing biodiversity loss and promoting local conservation stewardship, particularly under the current conditions Myanmar is in.”
The team also plans to expand its surveys across other parts of northern Myanmar to find more vital heron habitats, and, if funding allows, extend its research into Nagaland in India, where important strongholds for the species may also exist.
In addition to the white-bellied heron research, the WWF-Myanmar small grants program has sustained efforts on a range of other threatened species, such as white-rumped vultures, spoon-billed sandpipers, leopards, the Popa langur, and Asian elephants.
According to Gray, the success of many of these efforts underscores the resilience and adaptability of local communities facing political unrest. “When you have a crisis like the situation in Myanmar, and NGOs either voluntarily leave or are kicked out, it’s really important to maintain civil society’s ability to continue supporting conservation.”
Banner image: A white-bellied heron photographed in Bhutan. Image courtesy of Jonathan P. Slifkin.
Carolyn Cowan is a staff writer for Mongabay.
Citation:
Soe, N. Z., Shaung, B., Dee, S. N., Yamin, S. S., Gray, T. N., & Shwe, N. M. (2026). Conservation in response to a crisis: Initiating community-led conservation for the white-bellied heron Ardea insignis in northern Myanmar. Oryx, 1-4. doi:10.1017/s0030605325000079
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