of the three rivers, Padma, Meghna, and Brahmaputra. The Sundarban is a magnificentforest formed by hundreds of deltaic islands off the coasts of the three districts of Khulna,
Bagerhat, and Satkhira. The world's largest mangrove forest is a truly great geography ofbiodiversity, made up of wet saline soil, seawater tides, storms, and tidal surges. This vast
forest along the Bay of Bengal is also one of the world's natural wonders. The Sundarban,which covers an area of 10,000 sq km, has 6,017 sq km in Bangladesh and the rest across
the border in India. In 1997, UNESCO declared the Sundarban a World Heritage Site. The
Sundarban received Ramsar site status on May 21, 1992.
There are many opinions about the naming of the Sundarban. Although the origin of the
word Sundarban is unknown, most people believe that the Sundarban gets its name fromthe many ‘Sundari’ trees found there. Some people think that during British rule, foreign
tourists used to call this forest the ‘Jungle of Sundry’ after seeing the combination of
Birds of the Sundarban I 19