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Dana Ward for Unsplash Hari Prasad Sharma recalls being astonished when he visited the Chure region in Nepal’s southern Madhesh province to study sloth bears. Sharma, an associate professor of zoology at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, had planned to install camera traps in the region to study the bears, Melursus ursinus, in what was believed to be their prime habitat. But the human footprint in the area was overwhelming, he says. “The extraction of resources in the area is so massive that we didn’t find any fallen trees or twigs in the forests on which termites that bears feed on live,” Sharma says. This observation is echoed in a recently published study documenting Sharma and his team’s work. It suggests that overexploitation of forest resources outside protected areas in Nepal could be pushing the population of sloth bears inside protected areas in search of adequate food. The camera trap-based study was carried out in the subtropical forests of the Chure region, which c...