KATHMANDU — At dawn in Birta Deurali village of Kavrepalanchok in central Nepal, maize fields aren’t quiet. Farmers stand guard, scanning the trees for movement, but they aren’t the only ones there. “If you leave even for a short time, the monkeys do considerable damage,” said 46-year-old Sagar Tamang, a resident of Birta Deurali. Villagers take turns guarding fields every two hours, beating drums and sending dogs to chase them away. Nepal’s macaque crop raids are making national headlines, and the country’s researchers are testing artificial intelligence-based detection and deterrence systems, though even the scientists building them admit the technology isn’t yet a reliable fix. “We even hide food indoors, but they still find their way in,” Tamang said. “Only fire scares them now,” he added, referring to the burning sticks villagers’ wave to keep the monkeys at bay. For farmers such as Sunmaya Lama, 32, of the same village, the losses are adding up. “We lost maize worth 30,000 rupees (about $230) this year,” she said. “Over the past three years, it has reached around 90,000 rupees (about $670).” When she approached the local government, she said she was told there was no provision for compensation. “So we just bear the loss ourselves,” she said. A troop of rhesus macaques forage for food in Nepal. Image by Sunuwargr via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). A brewing crisis across the country The scale of the problem extends beyond the village. A 2022 nationwide analysis published in the Journal of Environmental…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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