Endangered
Botha's lark
Spizocorys fringillaris
Botha's lark is a lark in the family Alaudidae that is endemic to South Africa.
Appearance
This is a small, compact lark, exhibiting a boldly marked face with a pinkish, conical bill. It has grey-brown upperparts, contrasting with pale underparts and a streaked, buffy chest. This lark also exhibits spread out streaking on its flanks, that helps differentiate it from the similar pink-billed lark (Spizocorys conirostris) that has plain, white flanks.
Range and habitat
Botha's lark is a grassland specialist endemic to the high-altitude grasslands of South Africa, restricted to southern Mpumalanga, eastern Free State and potentially KwaZulu-Natal. Evidence suggests significant local extinctions across parts of its historical range. Likely driven by large-scale habitat loss, transformation, and fragmentation associated with agriculture and infrastructure development.
The implementation conservation measures would not only preserve Botha's lark, but also numerous other threatened species with overlapping distributions, among them grey crowned crane (Balearica regulorum), blue crane (Anthropoides paradiseus), Cape vulture (Gyps coprotheres), southern bald ibis (Geronticus calvus), Rudd's lark (Heteromirafra ruddi), yellow-breasted pipit (Hemimacronyx chloris) and sungazers (Smaug giganteus).
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Botha's lark feeds on a combination of seeds and insects, among them beetles and moths, although its diet has not been extensively studied. The diet of the chicks were found to be exclusively insect-based.
Grasshoppers comprised the majority of the food brought back to the nest. Botha's lark begins breeding with the first seasonal rains, typically from October to January.
In crisis
It is considered to be South Africa's most endangered bird species with approximately 340 mature individuals left in the wild. Over the last decade, there has been a 90% population decline resulting in the species regionally being uplisted to Critically Endangered in the 2025 Regional Red Data Book of Birds of South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini. In 1983, the global population of Botha's lark was estimated to be as many as 20,000 individuals.
This was later revised to a more conservative range of 1,500–5,000 individuals in 2000. By 2015, the global population was thought to number fewer than 2,500 individuals.
Botha's lark is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Botha's lark, Wikidata item Q1586590. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
