Time is running out for the great Indian bustard. In the wild, fewer than 150 of these critically endangered ostrich-like birds survive, mostly in India’s Rajasthan state. But a captive-breeding program, making a last-ditch attempt at preventing complete extinction of the species, is seeing signs of hope: it recently welcomed four great Indian bustard chicks, taking the total number of captive-raised birds to more than 50. “It has been an extremely uphill task,” said Sutirtha Dutta, senior scientist with the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and the Bustard Recovery Program. “At least now the species is not going to go extinct entirely.” Since 2019, the Bustard Recovery Program, a partnership between WII, the Rajasthan Forest Department and India’s environment ministry, has collected 42 eggs from great Indian bustards (Ardeotis nigriceps) in the wild, and hatched them in incubators at their captive-breeding centers. “We currently have 30 birds in captivity that are from these wild-laid eggs,” Dutta said. He added these first-generation captive-raised birds are the founder birds, or the F0 generation. Some of the founder birds have bred in captivity since March 2023 and laid eggs, which were also hatched in incubators. The 20 additional chicks born this way, seven in 2025 so far, are the F1 generation, Dutta said. There are now more than 50 captive-raised birds at the centers. Sumit Dookia, a wildlife biologist at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University who’s been working to protect the species’ habitat but isn’t involved in the captive-breeding program, told Mongabay by…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Captive-raised chicks offer hope for extremely rare great Indian bustard
