Great bustard

Great bustards eat leaves, flowers and seeds.

They also eat insects. The chicks eat lots of insects.

Great bustards eat both plants and small animals. For much of the year they eat mostly plants: young shoots, leaves, flowers and seeds. They also eat insects, worms and other small creatures, and sometimes a small lizard or a mouse.

They feed by quickly picking food up from the ground or snatching at plants. Young chicks eat mostly insects, then eat more plants as they grow.

The IUCN gives a diet of invertebrates, plants and seeds, and small vertebrates including mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds (Collar and Garcia 2020), and notes that undisturbed areas with plenty of insects are needed for successful breeding. The Great Bustard Group says plants dominate in spring, autumn and winter (young shoots, leaves, flowers, seeds, occasionally bulbs, berries and fruits), with insects, worms, small lizards and small mammals such as voles also taken; feeding is a swift pick-up from the ground and a fast snatching of vegetation, and chicks are chiefly insectivorous at first.

The IUCN adds that agricultural pesticides reduce the food chicks need to grow.

In spring, males show off on a special patch of ground.

They puff up their white feathers. In winter, great bustards live in flocks.

In spring, males gather on display grounds called leks. Each male cocks his tail, pulls his head back, blows up his throat pouch and turns his wings and tail feathers inside out, so a brown bird suddenly looks like a big white puff. Females come to choose a mate, and one male may mate with several females.

Great bustards like company. In winter they form flocks called droves, often 20 to 40 birds, and males and females usually keep to separate droves. Some populations migrate, while others stay near home.

The Great Bustard Group describes lekking males that cock the tail, withdraw the head and neck onto the back, inflate the gular pouch and turn wings and tail inside out in a 'foam bath' of white feathers; it calls the species polygynous, with a male mating with up to five females. It describes gregarious winter droves, often of 20 to 40 birds, with the sexes in separate droves and birds of similar age together.

The IUCN describes highly variable movements: obligate winter migrants in most of Asia, short-distance migrants in Iran, facultative migrants in central Europe, and partial migrants with different patterns for males and females in Iberia. The eastern subspecies spends about four months at migration stopovers and four months on its wintering grounds, and large winter flocks gather in Central Asia.

Great bustards are endangered. There are not many left.

People protect their fields and have brought them back to England.

The great bustard is listed as endangered. There are only about 29,600 to 33,000 adult birds, and their numbers are falling fast in many places. Farming changes, roads and new buildings take away their open land, and many birds fly into power lines and wind turbines. Illegal hunting is a problem in some countries, even though hunting them is banned everywhere they live.

There is good news too. In Germany, Austria and Hungary, careful protection has helped numbers grow. Great bustards died out in Britain in the 1800s, but since the early 2000s they have been brought back to Salisbury Plain in England.

BirdLife International assessed Otis tarda as Endangered (A3cd+4cd) for the IUCN Red List (assessed 21 August 2023, published 2023): rapid declines across most of the range, projected to become very rapid over three generations (generation length 11.8 years). Threats named include agricultural intensification, infrastructure and energy development, collisions with powerlines and wind turbines (the leading cause of adult deaths in Europe), illegal killing despite a hunting ban in all range countries, disturbance, predation by domestic dogs, agrochemicals and climate change.

Conservation has increased the West Pannonian population (Germany, Austria, Hungary) and, by dispersal, Romania's; powerline markers and buried cables reduce collisions. In the UK, where the BTO says the last wild breeding bird was recorded in 1832, a reintroduction begun in 2003 to 2004 produced the first fledged chicks in 2009 and almost 100 birds by 2022, counted as a managed subpopulation (IUCN; Great Bustard Group).