Great Bustard

The bird

A male is typically 90–105 cm (2 ft 11 in – 3 ft 5 in) tall, with a length of around 115 cm (3 ft 9 in) and has a 2.1–2.7 m (6 ft 11 in – 8 ft 10 in) wingspan.

Published measurements include mass about 143.

Range and habitat

The breeding range of the great bustard currently stretches from Portugal to Manchuria, though previously the species bred even further east in Russian Primorsky Krai. As a result of population declines across much of the range, more than half of the global population is now found in central Spain with around 30,000 individuals.The spanish region of Castile and Leon is home to around 30% of the great bustard global population.

In 2004, a project overseeing the reintroduction to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire using eggs taken from Saratov in Russia was undertaken by The Great Bustard Group, a UK Registered Charity that aims to establish a self-sustaining population of great bustards in the UK. The reintroduction of the great bustard to the UK by the Great Bustard Group is being carried out in parallel with researchers from the University of Bath who are providing insight into the habitat of native great bustard populations in Russia and Hungary.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

Male and female groups do not mix outside of the breeding season. The female may utter some guttural calls at the nest and brooded young make a soft, trilling call in communication with their mothers.

In northwestern Spain in August, 48.4% of the diet of adult birds was green plant material, 40.9% was invertebrates and 10.6% was seeds. In the same population during winter, seeds and green plant material constituted almost the entirety of the diet.

In crisis

Portugal and Spain now host about 60% of the world's great bustard population. As of 2008, the global population numbered between 44,000 and 51,000 birds (Palacin & Alonso 2008), about 38,000 to 47,000 in Europe, with 30,000 or more than half in Spain. Hungary had the next largest Great Bustard population with about 1,555 in the year 2012, followed by Ukraine and Austria.

Sizeable populations exist in Spain (23,055 birds), Russia (8,000 birds), Turkey (800–3,000 birds), Portugal (1,435 birds) and Mongolia (1,000 birds). A sizeable population also exists in Hungary (1,100–1,300 birds) where the Eastern European steppe zone ends, near Dévaványa town and also in the Hortobágy National Park, Nagykunság and Nagy-Sárrét regions.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Great Bustard 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 Great bustard, Wikidata item Q171655. 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.