BIRD OF THE WEEK!

 

AUSTRALIAN BUSTARD

This week’s Bird of the Week is a typical Australian Bustard!

Sadly, against common perception, there is only one true bustard in the country.

There are many other bustards across Asia and especially Africa but down under we just have the one.

And like the many other species surviving across the old world it is a deeply impressive bird; Males stand well over a metre tall!

The birds breed using Leks. That is breeding grounds where males gather for the purpose of display. The females observe and take their pick of all of the males present; thus it is they who have their hands on the steering wheel of evolution….

It is a bird quite closely related to the critically endangered Great Indian Bustard. At the risk of getting way ahead of myself perhaps the Australian Bustard could one day be introduced into India as an ecological substitute for the [perhaps] inevitable day that the Indian Bustard slides into oblivion. *Obviously this would only be done if the threatening processes [Hunting is considered the major causal factor] could be controlled.

[On a similar subject, a similar species, the Great Bustard has been recently re-introduced into the United Kingdom. See http://greatbustard.org/the-project/ ]

Great Bustard has been reintroduced on to the Salisbury Plain, UK

An old name for the specie is Plains Turkey. The turkey part of it is particularly ill-deserved however the Plains part of it is useful as this is a bird of grasslands and savanna over much of the northern and central part of the continent.

This bird can be seen on a variety of our tours; indeed many of the trips that venture either north or west there is a better than average chance of a sighting or several.