Before sunrise in the villages around Mujibnagar, in western Bangladesh, farmers have already begun watching the trees.
The concern is not a storm or thieves. It is the langurs.
They arrive in groups, sometimes 20 or 30 at a time, moving through banana and papaya groves, mango and lychee trees and paddy fields. They eat what they can and damage much of what they cannot.
In Gourinagar, Anandabas, Bagowan, Nazirakona and Dariapur, villages in Meherpur district, encounters with the animals have become almost routine. Residents say the groups have grown noticeably larger, particularly over the past month.
For farmers, the situation very is frustrating. A troop does not need to consume an entire crop to ruin it. Fruit is bitten and discarded. Plants are broken. Paddy is trampled.
The animals sometimes venture farther, entering courtyards and taking food left outside to dry. Residents say women and children can be reluctant to go outdoors when large groups are nearby.
Hundreds of miles away, monkeys are creating similar problems around the sal forests of Mymensingh and Tangail.
The encounters may appear to be isolated local nuisances. Wildlife researchers and forest officials say they point to a broader problem: The forests on which the animals depend have changed, and in some places their natural food supply is no longer sufficient.
In the Santoshpur forest beat in Fulbaria, Mymensingh, about 700 monkeys live in roughly 50 acres of sal forest. The pressure on that habitat is increasing. More than 150 female monkeys have recently given birth, according to local officials, and several dozen others are expected to have offspring.
Food has not increased at the same pace.
Banana and pineapple plantations exist nearby, residents say, but they are generally guarded against monkeys. Locals also say the animals sometimes avoid produce treated with pesticides.
Instead, an unusual food system has developed around human visitors.
Tourists bring bananas, biscuits, cakes and puffed rice. On busy days, those offerings can provide a significant source of food. During the monsoon, when visitor numbers decline, so does the supply.
There is no permanent government allocation to feed the monkeys, Md Emdadul Haque, the Santoshpur beat officer told Daily Waadaa. The local administration provides some rice that is scattered daily, he said, but the quantity is far below what the population requires.
The consequences of a shrinking natural food supply are perhaps most visible in Madhupur, in Tangail district.
Madhupur contains one of Bangladesh's best-known sal forests. It once supported a much wider range of wildlife, including elephants, bears and numerous species of monkeys. But decades of tree cutting, agricultural expansion, human settlement and encroachment have transformed large portions of the forest and reduced its ecological diversity.
In predominantly Garo communities around the forest, crop raids have become part of farming.
Monkeys descend on banana and papaya plantations, dragon-fruit farms, cotton fields and vegetable plots. They also enter transplanted Aman paddy fields. Some have learned that houses offer another source of food and enter in search of cooked meals.
“There is no food in the forest, and that is why the monkeys now come to the paddy fields,” said Hazrat Ali, a farmer. “They eat some of it and trample the rest under their feet.”
For banana growers, a brief encounter can destroy months of work.
“Once they bite into the banana blossom, it no longer produces fruit,” Sajjat Ali, another farmer told Waadaa. “The entire bunch is ruined.”
Islam Uddin, another farmer, said vegetable plots were particularly vulnerable.
“The monkeys eat the tender leaves of vegetables and destroy the entire field,” he said. “Once they come, they keep returning.”
Residents say government spending on wildlife conservation has done little to reduce the problem they encounter on their farms.
Forest officials dispute the suggestion that nothing is being done. They say efforts are underway to restore habitat and improve conditions for wildlife.
Rana Deb, an assistant conservator of forests in Tangail, told Waadaa that native tree species were being planted under a sal forest restoration project. Authorities were also creating new forest on land recovered from illegal occupation, he said.
But restoring the forests involves more than increasing the number of trees.
The older sal ecosystem contained bahera, haritaki, amlaki, wild jujube, wild date palm, small varieties of jamun, sonalu and numerous other native species. Their fruit, flowers, seeds and leaves provided food for monkeys, langurs and other animals throughout the year.
Over roughly three decades, much of that natural pantry has disappeared.
Forest clearing and encroachment have reduced habitat. Agriculture has expanded into former forest areas. Native trees have been removed, while some reforestation programs have relied on species that do not provide the same range of food for wildlife.
Santoshpur illustrates the transformation. The forest beat once contained 3,639 acres of forest land. Large areas were subsequently incorporated into social forestry and other projects, while hundreds of acres were occupied by encroachers. Some land has recently been recovered and reforestation has begun.
Madhupur faces a similar problem. Forest may remain on official maps, but researchers say acreage alone does not describe the quality of a habitat. A forest with fewer native fruiting and flowering species can support far fewer animals than the ecosystem it replaced.
That distinction helps explain why monkeys can live beside a forest and still go hungry.
In an intact habitat, monkeys eat a varied diet of fruit, leaves, flowers, seeds, nuts and bark. When those foods become scarce, their diet changes. They may turn to paddy, grass, insects and even ants — or discover that a nearby farm offers calories more easily than the forest does.
Once animals learn where those calories are available, keeping them away becomes difficult.
Dr MA Aziz, a wildlife researcher and professor of zoology at Jahangirnagar University told Waadaa that conventional tree planting alone would not address the problem.
Forest management would have to include recovering illegally occupied land, restoring native species that provide wildlife with food and creating sustainable sources of food within habitats, he said. He also called for compensation mechanisms for farmers whose crops are damaged.
Aziz said the current government had increased its work on wildlife conservation and expressed hope that the situation would gradually improve.
The challenge is that the interests of farmers and wildlife increasingly overlap on the same piece of land.
Farmers in Meherpur, Fulbaria and Madhupur are protecting crops on which their incomes depend. The monkeys and langurs are searching for food that their habitats once supplied.
The result is a conflict in which neither side readily retreats.
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