All species › Bustards › Bustards › Great bustard
Great bustard
Otis tarda | Grote trap | Avutarda común
The heaviest bird in Europe still able to fly, and by some way: an old male outweighs a White-tailed Eagle and a Mute Swan combined. In March a displaying male turns himself inside out into a ball of white feathers that shows for miles across a bare plain.
Voice
Effectively silent. Displaying males give a deep, muffled oomp that is hard to hear at a hundred metres and is usually lost to the wind; disturbed birds bark a short low chak. This is a bird to find by eye.
No freely licensed recording is available for this species yet.
Identification
No European bird shows a wider gulf between the sexes. An old male is three to four times the weight of a female and almost a third longer, with a blue-grey head and neck, long white bristles either side of the bill and a broad rufous breast band that deepens with age. Females lack both the whiskers and the breast band and are simply sandy grey. Both sexes have a finely black-barred ochre back and a white belly. In flight the wing is enormous and largely white with black primaries and a black trailing edge, the beats slow and goose-like.
Confusion species
At range the real confusion is with livestock, boulders or straw bales rather than with another bird. Little Bustard is under a quarter the weight, flies with far quicker beats and shows an almost wholly white wing with no black trailing edge. A female Great Bustard in poor light can suggest a male Little Bustard: check the much longer neck and the heavy, deliberate walk.
Habitat
Large treeless cereal plains with a mosaic of fallow, alfalfa and pulses; in central Europe also hay meadows and oilseed rape. Great Bustards avoid power lines, roads and any tall structure, and need open ground measured in hundreds of hectares with clear sightlines.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
The bulk of the world population is in Spain and Portugal, with further groups in Hungary, Austria, Slovakia, Czechia, Germany, Ukraine, Russia, Türkiye and Iran. Britain's native birds were shot out by 1832; since 2004 the Great Bustard Group has released birds of Russian and Spanish stock on Salisbury Plain, where a small free-flying population now breeds.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- Migration direction
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
In Britain, Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire; the released birds carry wing tags and are easiest in winter, when they gather in loose parties on the arable. On the continent the March–Thaya floodplain on the Austrian–Slovak border and the Dévaványa and Kiskunság steppes in Hungary are reliable in March and April. Watch from the vehicle: a bustard tolerates a car and will not tolerate a person on foot.
Conservation status
Uplisted from Vulnerable to Endangered in 2023. Collision with power lines is the chief cause of adult mortality, while the loss of fallow and fodder legumes, the switch from dry cereal to irrigation, early mowing and machinery disturbance destroy nests. Recovery schemes run in Britain and Germany, where the present birds go back on released stock and heavily guarded, predator-fenced breeding ground.