Critically Endangered
Lesser Florican
Sypheotides indicus
The lesser florican, also known as the likh or kharmore, is the smallest in the bustard family and the only member of the genus Sypheotides.
Appearance
A male in breeding plumage has a black head, neck and lower parts. Even so, his throat is white. Around three 4-inch (10 cm) long, ribbon-like feathers arise from behind the ear-coverts on each side of the head and extend backwards, curving up and ending in spatulate tip.
The lesser florican, also known as the likh or kharmore, is the smallest in the bustard family and the only member of the genus Sypheotides.
Range and habitat
The preferred habitat is grasslands but it sometimes occurs in fields such as those of cotton and lentils. Managing florican habitats as grassland interspersed with croplands and pastures spared rotationally provided optimal results at low production-level. It is endemic to the Indian Subcontinent where it is found in tall grasslands and is best known for the leaping breeding displays made by the males during the monsoon season.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Indigenous tribal hunters regularly shot the males during the breeding season, as they were easy to spot because of their courtship display. Lesser floricans feed on a wide variety of small vertebrates and invertebrates that include worms, centipedes, lizards, frogs and insects such as locusts, flying ants and hairy caterpillars.
Usually floricans feed during the early hours of mornings or in the evenings, except in the case of newly migrated birds that feed throughout the day. The breeding season varies with the onset of the Southwest Monsoon and is September to October in northern India and April to May in parts of southern India. During the breeding season, males leap suddenly from the grass with a peculiar croaking or knocking call, flutter their wings and fall back with slightly open wings.
In crisis
The species is highly endangered and has been extirpated in some parts of its range such as Pakistan. It is threatened both by hunting and habitat degradation.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Lesser Florican 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 Lesser Florican, Wikidata item Q1273465. 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.
