Critically Endangered
Great Indian Bustard
Ardeotis nigriceps
Great Indian Bustard is a large bird with a horizontal body, long bare legs and is among the heaviest of the flying birds.
Appearance
The body is brownish with a black patch spotted in white. The male is deep sandy buff coloured and during the breeding season has a black breast band. In the female that is smaller than the male, the head and neck are not pure white and the breast band is either rudimentary, broken or absent.
It is a large bird with a horizontal body, long bare legs and is among the heaviest of the flying birds.
Published measurements include mass about 145.
Range and habitat
In India, it historically occurred in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Today, the great Indian bustard occurs in Rajasthan, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat states of India. The great Indian bustard or Indian bustard is a bustard occurring on the Indian subcontinent.
At Ranibennur Blackbuck Sanctuary, habitat changes have affected wildlife populations.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
During the breeding season, it is solitary, but congregates to small flocks in winter. It is thought to use a mating system that has been termed as an "exploded or dispersed lek".
Breeding occurs between March and September, when the inflated fluffy white feathers of the male are inflated and displayed.
In crisis
Once common on the dry grasslands and shrubland in India, as few as 150 individuals were estimated to survive as of 2018, reduced from an estimated 250 individuals in 2011. It is critically endangered due to hunting and habitat loss. The great Indian bustard is listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2011.
It has been extirpated in 90% of its former range, and the population was estimated at perhaps fewer than 250 individuals in 2008. The main threats are hunting and habitat loss.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Great Indian Bustard is Critically 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 Indian Bustard, Wikidata item Q864359. 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.
