Great Bustard

Fascinating facts about the Great Bustard

• A male great bustard can weigh up to 16 kilograms — making him heavier than a bald eagle and twice the weight of a chicken. When he wants to breed, he inflates his throat pouch until it bulges like a beach ball, drops his tail feathers to the ground, and flips his wings inside-out to flash white plumage. This display lasts only seconds but burns so much energy the male must rest for hours. He'll repeat it dozens of times across the breeding season, sometimes losing 40% of his body weight just to attract a mate.
• Europe's heaviest flying bird once vanished almost completely — down to just 34 males across all of Spain by 1974. Today, careful reintroduction programmes have rebuilt the population to over 2,000 birds across the continent. Yet a bustard will still walk for hours across open grassland rather than fly, using flight only as a last resort. Their 2-metre wingspan demands so much lift that takeoff is a laboured, ungainly sprint into the wind.
• Male great bustards gather at traditional display grounds called leks, returning to the same patch of steppe or grassland for generations — some sites have been used for centuries. Dozens of males converge there each spring, each claiming a small territory the size of a football pitch, where they posture and strut but never fight. The females simply visit to watch, choose a male based on his performance, mate once, then leave to raise chicks alone.
• A chick great bustard must run behind its mother within hours of hatching and forage for insects across open ground with zero shelter — one of the harshest nurseries in the bird world. If a predator appears, the mother doesn't fight; she leads the chick on a deceptive broken-wing display, limping away to draw danger elsewhere. Only about 20% of chicks survive to fledging, yet those that do become so resilient they can live 25 years in the wild.
• Great bustards navigate by landmarks and magnetic fields, crossing hundreds of kilometres between their winter feeding grounds and spring breeding sites. A bird tagged in Kazakhstan was tracked flying 2,400 kilometres to breed in southern Russia — a journey it repeated year after year, proving these massive, ground-loving birds carry internal maps of entire continents. Yet they need vast, unbroken grasslands to survive; even a single motorway splits populations and kills birds that collide with power lines at night.

At a glance

About the Great Bustard

As the sun rises over the rolling grasslands, the Great Bustard stirs, its majestic form unfolding like a ghostly apparition, its soft, feathery plumage glistening with dew. With deliberate, loping strides, it moves through the landscape, its long neck scanning the terrain with an air of quiet vigilance, as if savoring the fragile beauty of its endangered world. In this fleeting moment, the Great Bustard embodies a poignant synthesis of elegance and vulnerability, a reminder of the precious, vanishing heritage of the natural world.

Discover more wildlife