The Irrawaddy, one of the world’s rarest species of freshwater dolphins, have been found in surprisingly large numbers deep in the waterlogged jungles of Bangladesh. Conservationists thought the Irrawaddy had dwindled in number to just a few hundred, but they have now counted almost 6,000 of them in the Sundarban mangrove forests and the adjacent waters of the Bay of Bengal. The forests of the Sundarban — Bengali for “beautiful forest” — lie at the delta of the Ganges and two other rivers on the Bay of Bengal.
