Birds of a felled forest: a Jago News column on deforestation in Bangladesh

On 6 July 2026 the opinion section of the Bengali news site Jago News published a column by Dr Harun Rashid, a journalist and columnist who is the site's deputy editor, under the title "The conversation of the birds of a forest that was cut down". The piece opens with an imagined exchange between two birds flying over the place where their tree once stood, and uses it to argue that Bangladesh is losing its hill forests, sal forests, coastal mangroves, village trees and old city trees to roads, industry, housing and tourism without counting what the birds and the people lose with them. This report sets out the writer's argument and places it beside what the Forest Department, IUCN Bangladesh, BirdLife International and other official and scientific sources had published on forests and birds before the column appeared.

The column begins in the sky. "Have you seen our tree?" a small bird asks its companion as the two fly towards the west. The other bird looks down for a while and replies that the tree is gone: there is a concrete wall there now, and people say that is development. The first bird falls silent, then asks what has become of their nest. The answer it receives is that there is no place for nests in the plans for development.

The two birds then fly on without a word. The writer notes that such silence is rare in the human world, but that the silence of nature is frightening, because there life disappears before sound does. He states plainly that the conversation is imaginary, but says its pain is real. After every forest that is cleared, every century-old tree that is felled and every wetland that is filled, he writes, thousands of such conversations take place that no one hears: people hear the sound of the saw but not the sound of a broken nest, and they watch development being inaugurated but not a bird being driven from its home.

From that opening the column widens. The writer argues that the history of civilisation is also a history of losing forests: forests were cut when people first made farmland, cut again when they built cities, and cut on a still larger scale during the Industrial Revolution. In the twenty-first century, he says, the question is no longer simply whether forests are cut, but whether people are building a world in which no creature other than humans will have a right to live.

Turning to Bangladesh, Dr Rashid writes that the same concern is visible at home. Hill forests, sal forests, coastal mangroves, village groves and even the old trees of the cities are, in his words, steadily disappearing, sometimes for a road, sometimes for an industrial zone, a housing scheme or a tourist centre. He accepts that all of these are needed. His objection is to need without wisdom: when the two are not joined, he argues, development in time becomes another name for self-destruction.

He asks readers to see a forest differently. A forest, he writes, is not a collection of trees standing on a piece of land but a shared state of countless lives: birds, bees, butterflies, snakes, foxes and micro-organisms bound together in a web of relationships that cannot be seen. On this view, felling a tree does not simply produce timber; it destroys a small universe. He links the loss to the wider warnings of environmental scientists that the world is passing through a biodiversity crisis, in which deforestation, climate change, pollution and unchecked consumption are pushing many species towards extinction, and he argues that this is a threat to humanity's own future as well as to animals.

The column also makes an economic and security argument. Forests, the writer says, hold rain, protect soil, keep rivers alive, clean the air and absorb carbon, yet these services are almost never counted when the gains of a development project are calculated. For Bangladesh, where he says the effects of climate change are already visible in rising temperatures, changing rainfall, stronger cyclones and shifting rivers, he describes forests not only as an environmental asset but as an inseparable part of national security.

The most complete official picture of Bangladesh's trees available when the column was written came from the Bangladesh Forest Inventory, carried out by the Forest Department under the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change. Its design and key results were published in the journal Forest Ecosystems on 7 February 2021. Field teams visited 1,781 plots and surveyed 6,400 households, and a national land cover map was produced for 2015.

Using the FAO's definition of forest, the inventory put forest cover in Bangladesh at 1,884,019 hectares, or 12.8 per cent of the country's total area, which it noted amounts to 11.7 hectares per 1,000 people. Counting land area only, excluding rivers, forest cover was 14.1 per cent. Hill forest was the largest forest type, covering 4.6 per cent of the country, followed by shrubs with scattered trees at 4.2 per cent and mangrove forest at 2.7 per cent. The inventory recorded a net decrease in national tree cover of 3.4 per cent between 2000 and 2015.

The same study showed how much of the country's tree wealth stands outside forests, in the village groves the column mentions. Trees outside forest, including those around rural homes, held 66 per cent of total biomass, and rural settlements alone accounted for half of the national growing stock of wood. When households were asked about disturbances to trees, they overwhelmingly named cyclones and infrastructure development, and when asked why tree cover was lost they mostly pointed to overharvesting and the removal of trees for construction.

Banglapedia, the national encyclopaedia of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, describes the main forest types the writer lists. Hill forests of tropical evergreen and semi-evergreen vegetation are found in Rangamati, Bandarban, Khagrachari, Chittagong, Cox's Bazar, Sylhet, Moulvibazar and Habiganj and cover about 1.40 million hectares, of which 0.67 million hectares are under the Forest Department and 0.73 million hectares are unclassed state forest under the Hill District Councils. Sal forests, a tropical moist deciduous type dominated by the sal tree (Shorea robusta), cover about 121,000 hectares, about 32 per cent of the total forest land, mostly in Gazipur, Tangail, Mymensingh, Jamalpur, Comilla, Dinajpur, Thakurgaon, Rangpur and Rajshahi. The largest belt, the Madhupur Garh between the Brahmaputra and the Jamuna, runs for about 96 kilometres. Banglapedia warns that sal forests have been shrinking rapidly through over-exploitation, deforestation, excessive collection of leaf litter and encroachment.

On the coast, the Sundarbans in the south-west is the largest continuous mangrove forest in the world, covering 0.6 million hectares according to the 2015 Red List of Bangladesh, which also notes that the Forest Department has planted about 0.11 million hectares of mangrove along the coast. The Sundarbans is a World Heritage Site and a Ramsar Site.

The column's birds are imaginary, but the loss it describes has been measured. In 2015 the Forest Department and IUCN Bangladesh, with World Bank funding through the Strengthening Regional Cooperation for Wildlife Protection project, published an updated Red List of Bangladesh. Launched in Dhaka on 22 June 2016, it assessed 1,619 animal species, of which 390 were found to be threatened (56 critically endangered, 181 endangered and 153 vulnerable) and 31 were regionally extinct, meaning they had disappeared from Bangladesh. IUCN named overexploitation and habitat degradation as the dominant threats.

Volume 3 of the Red List, on birds, assessed 566 species. Nineteen had disappeared from Bangladesh and were listed as regionally extinct; ten were critically endangered, twelve endangered and seventeen vulnerable, which together make 39 threatened species, nearly 7 per cent of the birds assessed. A further 29 were near threatened and 55 could not be assessed for lack of data. Of the 19 lost species, seven were forest dwellers, six lived in grass and bamboo and five were wetland birds. Large birds were hit hardest: the lost species include the Spot-billed Pelican, Greater Adjutant, Sarus Crane, White-bellied Heron, Indian Peafowl and Green Peafowl.

The Red List also ranked the condition of nine kinds of bird habitat, and its findings speak directly to the forests the column mentions. It placed deciduous (sal) forest among the three worst affected habitats, together with bamboo and grassland and with rivers and beels, saying that, being close to heavily populated areas, much of the deciduous forest has been converted, cleared and pillaged by land-grabbers, industries, squatters and picnickers, and that bird diversity and numbers in these forests have greatly diminished. All three parrotbill species, which lived only in extensive natural bamboo, had been lost. Mixed-evergreen hill forest, haor wetlands and homestead vegetation were listed as badly affected. The mangrove forest, the intertidal estuary and the Bay of Bengal were the least affected, and the Sundarbans had decayed the least of all Bangladesh's forests; over 300 bird species have been recorded there.

The column recalls that for people who grew up in Bangladesh's villages, morning once meant birdsong: the doel, the shalik, the bulbuli, the kokil and the machhranga each gave a season its own tune. That music, the writer says, has grown faint, and children in cities often know birds from picture books rather than from life, which he calls a cultural poverty as well as an environmental loss.

The birds he names are among the best known in the country. The doel, or Oriental Magpie-robin (Copsychus saularis), is the national bird of Bangladesh. Banglapedia describes it as a black-and-white, bulbul-sized bird that is not afraid of human homes, feeds on insects, snails, earthworms and small lizards, and breeds from February to July with a peak in April and May, when the male sings a clear, varied whistle. Bangladesh has 11 species of bulbul, birds of gardens, cultivation and secondary jungle that feed on fruit, nectar, berries and insects. The shalik belongs to the myna and starling family, with 12 species in Bangladesh, three of them migratory. The country has 12 species of kingfisher (machhranga), two of them threatened, and the kokil, the Asian Koel, is a cuckoo whose habit of laying eggs in other birds' nests is described in ancient Sanskrit literature, according to Banglapedia.

These common birds of homesteads have so far fared better than forest specialists. The Red List observed that the quality of homestead vegetation as a habitat has been flagging with the growth of the village economy and changes in lifestyle, but that its birds had not suffered as badly as others, probably because of their mastery of living in man-made surroundings.

The writer argues that birds are not only symbols of beauty: they make forests, spread seeds, control insects and pollinate flowers, and their decline is a sign that a whole ecosystem is unwell. BirdLife International, the body responsible for assessing birds for the global IUCN Red List, makes the same point in its State of the World's Birds 2022 report, published on 27 September 2022, which describes birds as predators, pollinators, seed dispersers, scavengers and ecosystem engineers. The report cites studies showing that insect-eating birds worldwide consume an estimated 400 to 500 million tonnes of prey a year, suppressing pest populations; that excluding birds from plants pollinated by both birds and insects cuts fruit and seed production by an average of 46 per cent; and that where hornbills are abundant they can disperse up to 12,700 large seeds per square kilometre each day.

The same report described a global decline. Of the world's roughly 11,000 bird species, 49 per cent had declining populations, and 1,409 species, just over one in eight, were threatened with extinction. Agricultural expansion and intensification affected 73 per cent of threatened birds and logging 50 per cent. Nearly two-thirds of bird species live in forests, many of them forest specialists found in no other habitat, and the report put forest loss from harvesting for forest products at around 7 million hectares every year.

Behind the writer's reference to a global biodiversity crisis stand two major assessments. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) reported on 6 May 2019 that around 1 million animal and plant species were threatened with extinction, that three-quarters of the land-based environment had been significantly altered by human actions, and that changes in land and sea use were the leading direct driver of nature's decline. The FAO's Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020 put the world's forests at 4.06 billion hectares and estimated deforestation at 10 million hectares a year in 2015 to 2020, down from 12 million hectares a year in 2010 to 2015.

Dr Rashid writes that economists now speak of natural capital and that many countries include the economic value of environmental resources in their national development plans, having understood that growth achieved by destroying nature does not last. The idea has an international statistical standard: in March 2021, at its 52nd session, the UN Statistical Commission adopted the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA), a framework for recording the extent and condition of ecosystems and the services they provide, in physical and in money terms, and linking them to economic activity.

The Bangladesh Forest Inventory gave an idea of the value at stake. Its socio-economic survey estimated the primary tree and forest products that households collected at 3.07 per cent of national gross domestic product in 2017-18, at current prices, worth on average 19,518 taka a year to a household, mostly as fruit and energy. Products used for cooking and heating alone were valued at 202,927 million taka a year.

The column also points to cities around the world that have adopted green infrastructure, where felling a tree is the last option rather than the first, roads are designed around old trees, corridors are left for wildlife to move, and restoring damaged forest is a required investment. The European Commission, which set out an EU strategy on green infrastructure in 2013, defines it as a strategically planned network of natural and semi-natural areas with other environmental features, designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services while also enhancing biodiversity.

Among the steps the writer calls for, environmental impact assessment should become a genuine scientific process rather than a paper formality; local communities should be made partners in protecting forests; more native tree species should be planted; and wetlands and hills should be treated as living ecosystems rather than as empty land waiting for development. The legal framework already contained some of these ideas. Section 12 of the Bangladesh Environment Conservation Act, 1995, as amended in 2010, bars setting up any industrial unit or taking up any project without environmental clearance from the Director General of the Department of Environment, and requires the rules on clearance to cover environmental impact assessment reports, environmental management plans and public consultation.

For wildlife and trees, the law in force when the column was published was the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act, 2026 (Act No. 86 of 2026, dated 10 April 2026 and in force from 7 January 2026), which repealed the 2012 Act. Its provisions touch several of the column's themes:

• Section 2(52) defines hunting to include collecting or destroying the nests or eggs of wild birds.
• Section 2(57) defines a memorial tree as a traditional tree or old native plant of social, cultural and customary value, or a century-old tree; under section 16 the Forest Department may declare such trees and groves protected, section 17 bars felling, removing or harming them except to save life, and breaking those restrictions carries up to six months in prison or a fine of up to 50,000 taka.
• Section 18 lets the government declare sanctuaries and national parks, including bird sanctuaries, after taking the views of the communities that depend on the area.
• Section 19 bars, in sanctuaries and national parks, hunting, destroying wildlife habitat and cutting any plant except for silvicultural operations, and from the Act's commencement forbids building new industries, commercial establishments or brick kilns within two kilometres of their boundaries.

The Red List's own recommendations for birds ran along similar lines to the column's: invest in protecting habitats, control the use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers, and harness people's love of birds, including by rewriting the brief and unappealing conservation lessons in elementary schools so that a new generation grows up environmentally conscious. The writer makes the same point about education, saying that children are taught to pass exams, win competitions and succeed, but are rarely taught the value of a tree, the need for a bird or the language of a river.

The column closes by returning to the birds. If the birds of the felled forest ever came back, the writer imagines, they would not put anyone on trial or ask for compensation; they would only ask whether people truly believed their world would be more beautiful without them. However tall the buildings, he writes, a sky without birds cannot be a symbol of civilisation, a country without forests cannot be safe, and no technology yet exists that can bring back a lost ecosystem. He calls the imagined conversation an early draft of the history of the future, in which people will be remembered either as the killers of forests or as their last guardians, and ends with the thought that the Earth is not an inheritance from our ancestors but a trust borrowed from our children.

Photo: Arif tonmoy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources: Jago News (column by Dr Harun Rashid, 6 July 2026), Bangladesh Forest Department and IUCN Bangladesh (Red List of Bangladesh 2015, Volume 3: Birds; IUCN release on the Red List launch, 2016), Forest Ecosystems (Bangladesh Forest Inventory, 7 February 2021), Banglapedia, BirdLife International (State of the World's Birds 2022), IPBES (Global Assessment release, 6 May 2019), FAO (Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020), UN Statistics Division (SEEA Ecosystem Accounting), European Commission (green infrastructure), Prothom Alo (22 June 2016), Bangladesh Environment Conservation Act 1995 and Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2026 (bdlaws.minlaw.gov.bd)