- The great Indian bustard, that narrowly missed being christened India’s national bird, is now teetering on its last legs.
- Several threats — including power lines — are decimating bustard populations.
- India, effectively the only home of the bustards, now harbours less than 150 individuals in five States.
- What changed after 1969, when over 1,000 of these large, stately birds still roamed the dry grasslands of 11 Indian States?
- While hunting was probably one of the first factors (the bird was a popular game bird and still is in some pockets, despite being listed in Schedule I of India’s Wildlife Protection Act), bustard habitats have undergone tremendous change over the last decades.
- The untamed, arid grasslands that bustards thrive in are categorised as ‘wastelands’, like most grassland habitats in India.
- The push to make these areas more ‘productive’ has seen an increase in water availability in these parts, resulting in the spillover of agricultural land into bustard habitats.
- Yet the birds do rely on agricultural fields too, suggests the only study of their diets to date: in the mid 1980s, researchers found that though they are predominantly insect-eaters, bustards “relished” arugula plants and ate cultivated Bengal gram and Ziziphus or ber berries.
- More recent but unpublished data also suggests that the wide-ranging birds disperse to agricultural landscapes near Gujarat’s Kachchh during the non-breeding season.
- Yet, intensification of agriculture — including more pesticides, barbed-wire fences and new crops — could endanger the birds’ survival in this landscape.
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- Bustards, with their poor frontal vision and heavy bodies, cannot manoeuvre away from cables in time.
- Around 18 bustards are likely to die every year (from a population of around 128 in the Thar) due to high-tension cables that intersect priority bustard habitat here.
- A landscape-level approach that will incentivise people to take up less intensive agriculture is required.
