A growing field guide to the wildlife of Sumatra — mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians. This edition covers 1,197 species, 858 of them with photographs, across 23 wildlife-watching areas.
The checklist is assembled from published distribution records for Sumatra and its offshore islands, weighted towards the species a visitor has a realistic chance of seeing. Birds are the most complete section; small mammals, amphibians and reptiles are thinner than the island's real diversity, simply because far fewer of them are documented and photographed.
Treat it as a working field guide rather than a complete inventory. Taxonomy and identifications are still being reviewed, and species without an image are marked “No photo yet”.
The status label on a species page is its global IUCN Red List category — how threatened the species is worldwide. It is not a Sumatran assessment, and the difference matters here more than almost anywhere: several of Sumatra's most important animals are endemic subspecies or island populations in far worse shape than the species-level category suggests.
Indonesia separately maintains its own list of legally protected species, which governs what may be kept, traded or disturbed. That is a legal status rather than a measure of extinction risk, and it is not shown in this guide.
National park entry rules, fees, permits and road access change often, and several areas can only be visited with a registered local guide. Check current conditions with the park office or your operator before you travel rather than relying on the details here.
Wildlife sightings are never guaranteed. The species listed for each area are what is realistically possible there, not what you should expect on a given day.
Your trip plan and sightings are saved in this browser, on this device only — we never see them. Clearing your browser data will clear them too, so download the PDF if you want a copy to keep. Email buttons open a draft in your mail app; nothing is sent until you send it.
Photographs come from three places: images shared directly with us by photographers and partner organisations and used with their permission; openly licensed images from Wikimedia Commons and iNaturalist under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA; and our own photographs. Every one is credited to the person who took it.
Photographs are chosen to show the species clearly, so some were taken elsewhere in its range rather than in Sumatra. Tap the ⓘ button on any photograph to see who took it and under what licence. The full list is below.