Great Indian Bustard: The Desert Giant Losing the Sky

One of the world's heaviest flying birds

The Great Indian Bustard (Ardeotis nigriceps) is a tall, ground-dwelling bird of open grassland and semi-desert, standing about a metre high with a broad buff body, long grey neck and black crown. Adult males can weigh 15 kg — placing it among the heaviest flying birds in the world.

It once occurred across much of India and eastern Pakistan. Today, fewer than 150 mature birds survive, almost all of them in Rajasthan's Thar Desert.

A range collapsed to a corner

The last stronghold is a landscape of grassland, fallow field and low scrub around the Desert National Park in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan. A tiny outlier population persists in Kutch, Gujarat, and single males are occasionally reported from Maharashtra and Karnataka.

Fifty years ago the species was still breeding in nine Indian states. That range has effectively collapsed to two.

Slow breeding, low tolerance

Great Indian Bustards are slow breeders even by bustard standards. Females lay a single egg on the bare ground, incubate it alone, and take at least 12 months to fledge and raise a chick. In many years, breeding success across the whole population is measured in just a handful of chicks.

This means the species cannot absorb high adult mortality. Any factor that removes even a few adults per year has an outsized effect.

Why powerlines are the emergency

The Thar Desert has become one of India's largest renewable-energy zones, with vast solar and wind farms connected by hundreds of kilometres of high-voltage overhead lines. Great Indian Bustards fly heavily, low, and with a narrow forward field of vision — a combination that makes powerlines almost invisible to them in flight.

A 2020 Wildlife Institute of India study estimated that powerlines kill up to 15% of the remaining population every year. In 2021, the Supreme Court of India ordered undergrounding of powerlines in priority bustard habitat, though implementation has been slow.

Captive breeding in Desert National Park

The Wildlife Institute of India and Rajasthan Forest Department run a captive-breeding facility in the Desert National Park, taking wild eggs, hatching them under controlled conditions and hand-rearing the chicks. The first captive-bred birds hatched in 2019 and the programme has since produced several successful cohorts.

This buys time. But without powerline mitigation, releasing captive-bred birds into the same landscape will simply feed the same mortality sink.

A last-decade species

The Great Indian Bustard is one of the clearest examples in the world of a species that can still be saved this decade but almost certainly not the next, if renewable-energy infrastructure and bustard habitat are not reconciled. It is a hard, specific engineering problem — and time is short.